THE HISTORY OF THE TIMES

Volume VII 1981–2002

The Murdoch Years

GRAHAM STEWART

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Preface

1   A Licence to Lose Money

2   ‘The Greatest Editor in the World’

3   Cold Warrior

4   Ancient and Modern

5   Fortress Wapping

6   Fifty-Four Weeks under Siege

7   Independent Challenges

8   Sturm und Drang

9   Simon Jenkins

10   Critical Times

11   The Heart of Europe

12   New Labour, New Journalism

13   War in Peacetime

14   Dumbing Down?

List of Illustrations

Plates

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Copyright

About the Publisher

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]

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] 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] 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] 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]

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 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]

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] 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] 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]

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]

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] 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]

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]

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] 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]

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] 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]

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]

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]

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] 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] Murdoch considered Brunton ‘clear-headed and strong-willed’.[23] 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]

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] 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] 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] 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]

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]

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]

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] 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] 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] 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] 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]

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] 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] 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]

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] 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]

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 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] 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] 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]

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]

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]

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] 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] 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] 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]

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]

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]

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] 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] This contrasted with Murdoch who was ‘neither greatly to the left or greatly to the right’.[55] 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] 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]

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] 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] 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]

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] 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] 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]

The first major newspaper to carry the news was Rothermere’s London Evening Standard. The banner headline roared out ‘MURDOCH BUYS THE THUNDERER’.[64]

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] 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] 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] 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]

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]

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]

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]

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] 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] 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] 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] 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] Subsequently, Murdoch assumed that Biffen was ‘probably told what to do by Margaret.’[77] 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]

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]

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] 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] 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]

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] 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 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] 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] 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] 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]

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] 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 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]

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]

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] 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] 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] 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]

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] 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] 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] 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]

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]

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] 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]

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] 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.[1] 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’.[2]

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.[3] 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.[4]

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.’[5] 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 …’[6] 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.’[7]

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.[8] 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.[9] 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.[10] 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’.[11] 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.’[12] This was an assessment broadly shared by the new editor.[13] 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.’[14] 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.’[15]

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”.’[16]

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.’[17] 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).[18]

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.[19]

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.[20] 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’.[21]

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.[22] 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.[23] 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.’[24] 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’.[25] 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.[26] 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.[27] 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.[28] 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.[29] 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.’[30]

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.[31]

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.[32] 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.[33] 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.[34]

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.[35]

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.[36]

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.[37]

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.[38]

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.’[39] 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.’[40] 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.[41] 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.[42] 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.’[43]

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.[44] 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.[45]

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’.[46] 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’.[47] 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.[48] 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.’[49]

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.[50] 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’.[51]

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.[52] 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.[53] 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’.[54] 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’.[55] 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.[56]

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).[57]

Margaret Thatcher had told the 1980 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.[58]

‘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.[59]

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’.[60] 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’.[61] 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.’[62]

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.[63] 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.[64]

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.[65] 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.’[66] 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’.[67]

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.’[68] 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.’[69] 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’.[70]

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.[71]

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.”’[72]

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.[73]

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’.[74]

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.’[75]

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’.[76]

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.’[77] 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.[78] 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.[79]

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’.[80] 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’.[81] 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’.[82] 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’.[83]

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.[84] 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’.[85] 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’.[86] 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.[87]

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.[88]

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.’[89]

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.’[90]

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’.[91] 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.[92] 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.[93] 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.[94]

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.’[95] 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.’[96]

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.’[97]

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.’[98] 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.[99] 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.[100]

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’.[101] 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’.[102] 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.’[103] 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.[104]

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’.[105] 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.[106] 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.[107] 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.[108]

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.’[109] 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.[110] 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.[111] 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.’[112] 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.’[113]

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’.[114] 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.[115] 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’.[116]

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.[117]

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’.[118] 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.’[119]

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.[120] 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.’[121]

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.’[122] 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’.[123] 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.’[124] 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).[125] 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’.[126] 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.[127] 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. [128] Leapman, meanwhile, continued to express dissatisfaction and when Evans demanded an assurance of a ‘reasonable’ attitude from him he resigned,[129] 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.[130] 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.[131] Evans was sorry to see him go but was unable to dissuade him from doing so.[132] 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.[133]

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.’[134]

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’.[135]

There was a journalistic maxim that ‘you can edit with a typewriter or a calculator, but not both’.[136] 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.[137] 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.[138] 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.’[139] 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.[140] 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.[141] 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.’[142]

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’.[143] 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.[144] 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’.[145] 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.[146] 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.’[147]

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.[148] 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?’[149] 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.’[150] 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,[151] 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.[152] 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.[153]

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.[154] 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.[155] 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.[156] 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’.[157] 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.[158] 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.[159] 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.’[160] 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’.[161] 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.[162] 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.[163]

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.[164] 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”.’[165] 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’.[166] 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’.[167] 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’.[168]

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.[169]

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’.[170] 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.’[171]

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’.[172] 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.[173] 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).[174] 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’.[175] 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.[176] 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.[177] 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.[178] 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.[179] 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.[179] 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.’[180] Douglas-Home later repaid her efforts by giving a book written by her husband a noticeably glowing review.[181] 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.”’[182]

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.’[183] 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.’[184] 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.’[185] 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.’[186]

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.[187]

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.’[188] 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.’[189]

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’.[190] 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.[191]

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.[192] 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.[193] 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.[194]

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.[195] 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’.[196]

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’.[197] 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.[198] 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.[199] 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.[200] 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.[201] 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.[202] 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.’[203] 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.’[204]

Did Murdoch interfere in editorial policy? Donoughue disliked hearing that Murdoch thought his leader articles were too generous towards Tory ‘wets’ or Social Democrats.[205] Evans chose to disregard the proprietor’s expressed hope that The Times would take a critical line on the Civil List.[206] 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.[207] 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.[208] 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.’[209] 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.[210] 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.[211] 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’.[212] 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.[213] 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.[214] 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.[215] 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.[216] 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’.[217] 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?’[218] 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.’[219] 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.’[220] 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.’[221]

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.[222] 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.[223]

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.[1] 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.[2] 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’.[3]

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.[4]

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’.[5] 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.[6] 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.[7] 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.[8]

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.[9]

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!’.[10] 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.[11] 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.[12]

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.’[13] 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.’[14] 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’.[15] 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’.[16] 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.[17]

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’.[18] 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.[19] 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’.[20] 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.[21]

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.[22] 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’.[23] 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.[24] 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.[25] 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’.[26]

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!’[27] 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.[28] 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’.[29] 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.[30]

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.[31] 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’.[32] 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.[33]

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.[34]

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.[35] ‘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’.[36]

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.’[37] 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’.[38] 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.[39] 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’.[40]

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.[41] 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’.[42]

‘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.[43] 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’.[44]

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’.[45] 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.[46] 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.[47] 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.[48] 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!’[49]

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.[50] 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.[51]

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.[52]

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.’[53] 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’.[54] 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.[55] The true death toll was withheld until the assault on Stanley had commenced on time and at full strength.[56] 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.’[57]

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.’[58]

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.’[59] 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’.[60] 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.’[61] 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.[62]

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.[63]

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.[64] 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.[65] 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.[66]

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.[67]

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 …’[68] 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’.[69] 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.’[70]

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.[71] 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.’[72]

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’.[73] 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’.[74] 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.’[75]

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.’[76]

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.[77] 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.’[78]

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.[79] 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.’[80]

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.[81] 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’.[82] 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’.[83]

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.[84]

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.’[85] 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’.[86] 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. [87] 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.[88]

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.[89] 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.[90]

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’[91]

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?’[92] 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’.[93]

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”.’[94]

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.[*] 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.’[95] 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.[96] 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.[97] 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’.[98] 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.[99]

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’.[100] 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”.’[101] 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.[102]

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.[103] 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’.[104]

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’.[105] 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.[106]

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’.[107] 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?’[108]

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’.[109]

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’[110] 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.’[111] 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’.[112] 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’.[113] 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.[114] 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.’[115] 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’.[116] 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’.[117]

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’.[118] 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.[119]

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.’[120]

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.’[121] 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.[122]

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?’[123] 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.[124] 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’.[125] 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.’[126] 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.[127] 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 …

[*] 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.

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.[1] 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.[2]

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 had merely taken it on trust that their reporter, Gerd Heidemann, knew (but would not disclose) the German officer’s identity. The reality was that no such custodian existed and that Heidemann had been dealing directly with Kujau, the forger. Thus Dacre commenced his investigations on the basis of false premises. He was given an afternoon to inspect what was placed before him. Reading the spidery writing proved difficult but he was impressed by the style of the calligraphy and by its deterioration towards 1945. Besides the dairies shown him, there were also supposed to be supplementary archives (in reality, not yet forged) that included documents on a possible son in France, a manuscript for an unpublished book by Hitler about Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, sketches for an opera entitled Wieland the Blacksmith and about three hundred other drawings and water-colours in Hitler’s hand. This would have been an extraordinary amount for one man to forge. In quantity, it bore comparison only with the medieval trade in splinters of the true cross. Faced with the prospect of so much material, Dacre found it hard to believe it could have been the work of a lone forger (although he appears not to have thought of a more logical problem – how the real and rather busy Adolf Hitler could have found the time).

Since Stern were not planning on going public until 11 May, there was plenty of opportunity for Dacre to withhold a definitive judgment between his first sight of the diaries on the afternoon of 8 April and his chance to visit Heidemann in Hamburg to discuss their provenance and see the rest of the archive in his keeping. Dacre later blamed the turn of events on the pressure he was placed under by Douglas-Home: ‘I allowed myself to be bounced by Charles,’ he later complained, ‘instead of demanding time to check the documents in the normal scholarly way.’[3] This was not the recollection of Colin Webb, who believed Douglas-Home did not apply as much pressure as Dacre seemed to imagine. If Dacre really did feel – as he should have felt – that his afternoon’s work in the Handelsbank was not enough to give an informed judgment he did himself and everyone else involved great damage by emerging from the vault and immediately getting on the telephone to urge not a qualified opinion but rather to bellow down the receiver in triumph to Douglas-Home, ‘Come at once! They’re the real McCoy!’[4]

The editor took Dacre at his word. Within moments of being telephoned with the joyous news, Douglas-Home and Rupert Murdoch were organizing their flight over to Zurich in Murdoch’s private jet, accompanied by Richard Searby and Sir Edward Pickering. Gerald Long (now deputy chairman of News International) arrived separately from Paris. On arrival in the vault, the material was laid out for the distinguished guests. Wilfried Sorge read extracts out in German with Long providing simultaneous translations into English. It all sounded plausible enough. The tour of inspection duly completed, the News International and Stern delegations got down to business at the Baur au Lac Hotel in Zurich. Murdoch offered $2.5 million for the US rights plus $750,000 for Britain and the Commonwealth. This got a provisional acceptance and the Times party boarded Murdoch’s jet bound for London believing the scoop of the decade was in the bag.[5]

Shortly afterwards, Murdoch was not amused when he learned Stern had welched on the handshake. Instead they offered the US rights to Newsweek and asked News International (or, in its ultimate guise, News Corp.) to increase its offer if it wanted to return to the bidding war. With this tactic, Stern underestimated a man who did not like to be double-crossed. When Murdoch arrived at Stern’s offices in Hamburg to recommence the negotiations, the German management were horrified to find the Newsweek executives walking in with him. Rather than be strung along against each other, the two companies had decided on a joint package that would split the cost between them. The negotiations recommenced. Despite years of participating in tough diplomacy with unions, commercial rivals and worldly shareholders, Murdoch was aghast at the naked effrontery with which Stern attempted to rip him off. During an adjournment, he discussed the situation with his team which had now been augmented by the arrival of Michael Binyon. Now the Times Bonn correspondent, Binyon had been diverted from the West German capital to Hamburg by the deputy editor’s office and told not to tell The Times’s foreign desk where he was going (an instruction that led him to assume he was going to a spy’s debriefing). Murdoch confided to his advisers that he thought Stern were ‘a bunch of cowboys.’ This assessment was borne out when, in the subsequent negotiating session, Stern responded to the repetition of the News Corp. – Newsweek offer price, which they had already agreed, by dramatically raising the hurdle again to $4.25 million. At this Murdoch said, ‘I’m sorry’, got up and walked out of the room. The Newsweek team followed him.

Back in their Hamburg hotel, Murdoch, Binyon and the rest of the News Corp. delegation enjoyed a celebratory evening. The Germans’ arrogance and negotiating antics had been beyond belief. Murdoch appeared jovial and relaxed, seemingly happy that, as he put it, ‘that’s the end of all that rubbish’.[6] As soon as they learned that the News Corp. and Newsweek teams had packed their bags and left for home, the Stern management panicked. Their attempts to solicit rival bids had not met with much success and the further afield they made approaches the greater the prospect that the secret would leak out. Swallowing their pride, they flew out to New York to make Murdoch a new, much lower, offer. Now they were coming to him. It was clear who had the whip hand. Having days earlier offered, with Newsweek, to pay $3.75 million, News Corp. now picked up the diaries at the knockdown price of $800,000 for the US and $400,000 (£256,000) for the British and Commonwealth rights.

While Murdoch was gliding his thumb around the Stern begging bowl, Lord Dacre was in Hamburg visiting Gerd Heidemann. He wanted to see Heidemann’s personal collection of Nazi ‘memorabilia’. As he was shown around, Dacre was slowly coming to the conclusion that the custodian of these artefacts was a little peculiar. Besides possessing Hermann Goering’s yacht, Stern’s long-serving reporter was the proud owner of two pairs of Idi Amin’s (extra large) white cotton underpants. He also mentioned that he was in close touch with Martin Bormann who was, apparently, alive and well and living in Switzerland.[7] Clearly Heidemann was at the unhealthy end of eccentricity. Nonetheless, Dacre continued to believe that a serious periodical like Stern had gone through the proper processes of authentication. He recorded a piece to camera for the magazine to use when the story was ready to break.

That date was supposed to be 11 May, but Stern was panicked into bringing publication day forward nearly three weeks when, on 21 April, its rival, Der Spiegel, rang to enquire whether it was true it was in possession of Hitler’s diaries. Stern could not afford to lose the scoop of breaking the news. This, of course, affected what The Times would do. It had been agreed that The Times, rather than the Sunday Times, would run the story first in Britain. In any case, it had been The Times that had taken the initiative from the first and Murdoch noted the extent to which Douglas-Home was ‘so excited and thought it was an incredible story’. In contrast, the Sunday Times’s editor, Frank Giles, was far less enthusiastic. The two papers remained protective of their respective independence. Murdoch thought this was because Giles ‘didn’t like it because it came out of The Times’ and resented the proprietor’s insistence that his Sunday paper should serialize it after the daily had made the running.[8] At the Sunday Times, Philip Knightley – remembering the Mussolini saga of 1968 – raised his doubts and even contacted Dacre by telephone to seek, and gain, some reassurance.[9] Without enthusiasm, Giles bowed to his proprietor’s will.

The positive phraseology on the front page of The Times on Saturday 23 April was unfortunate. ‘Hitler’s secret diaries to be published’ ran the front-page headline. Readers’ attention was drawn to the serialization commencing in the following day’s Sunday Times. It had fallen to the usually perspicacious Michael Binyon to write the article and, although he mentioned in passing that two leading West German historians (who, unlike Dacre, had not seen the diaries) had cast doubt on their veracity, the tone of the opening sentence – ‘Sixty volumes of hitherto unknown diaries kept by Adolf Hitler throughout his 12-year dictatorship have been discovered …’ – implied there was not much room for doubt. In fact, Binyon’s original copy had been much more guarded. His opening sentence had stated that ‘hitherto unknown diaries allegedly kept by Adolf Hitler’ had been discovered, but Charles Wilson, the pugnacious deputy editor, scored out the qualification. Wilson told Binyon, in blunt language, that News Corp. had not spent $1.2 million on anything ‘allegedly’ newsworthy.[10]

The comment page that day was almost entirely given over to Lord Dacre to expound upon the ‘Secrets that survived the Bunker’. With each assertion the eminent historian dug himself deeper and deeper into a bunker of his own devising: ‘I am now satisfied that the documents are authentic,’ he informed readers. The sheer volume of material was compelling evidence in itself as was the story behind their salvage from the wreck of the plane sent out on Hitler’s birthday in April 1945 to take them to safety. Taken together, this ‘seems to me to constitute clear proof of their authenticity’. While others might argue that the sheer scale of the archive was incompatible with Hitler’s known aversion to writing, Dacre turned logic on its head: ‘If Hitler (as he said in 1942) had long ago found writing by hand a great effort, that may be not so much because he was out of practice as because he already suffered from writer’s cramp.’[11]

The Times had its scoop, but the news that the Sunday Times was about to start serialization prompted its rivals into action. The Observer and the Mail on Sunday both paid David Irving to pronounce in their papers that the Sunday Times had bought a forgery. The German Bild Zeitung offered to fly Irving out to interrupt Stern’s proposed press conference in Hamburg on Monday. Irving and Douglas-Home locked horns on BBC television over the diaries’ authenticity, The Times’s editor attempting to pull rank with the words, ‘I have smelt them. I’m a minor historian and we know about the smell of old documents. They certainly smelt.’[12] Doubtless they did, although not of what the minor historian imagined. Indeed, while the opprobrium would soon fall in heaps upon Dacre, Douglas-Home was also not above criticism, having allowed his excitement to overcome his better judgment. He had been particularly impressed by an extract in which Hitler had praised the destruction of the synagogues while being sorry about the loss of ancient glass. ‘Typical Hitler!’ Douglas-Home pronounced.[13] This was rather hasty, but he was about to make a sin of omission, whether or not intentionally, that was to do far more serious damage to the reputation of the Sunday Times – so much so that The Times’s role in the fiasco was soon overlooked.

II

Dacre’s first doubts struck him on Saturday morning – the same morning in which his lengthy and confidently expressed Times article was gracing breakfast tables the length and breadth of the country. He decided he ought to ring Douglas-Home to tell him. Had he thought about it, the Master of Peterhouse should have recognized it was important to tell Frank Giles at the Sunday Times since its pages of serialization would be going to press later that day. But it was The Times that had commissioned Dacre and its executives were those with whom he had the closest rapport. In any case, it was not unreasonable to assume that if the editor of The Times thought it merited a call he was capable of ringing the editor of the Sunday Times himself. On telephoning The Times, Dacre was put through to Colin Webb, who telephoned Douglas-Home at his home with the news that Dacre was having second thoughts. Eventually Douglas-Home got back to Webb to double-check what had been said. Nobody telephoned the Sunday Times. Webb imagined Douglas-Home would do it. Perhaps Douglas-Home imagined Webb had already done it (but did not ask him if this was so).[14] With Sunday’s deadline approaching, Dacre thought it odd that nobody at the Sunday Times had rung to discuss the situation with him, but he did not take the trouble to pick up the telephone himself. It was certainly a muddle.

It was after 7 p.m. when the sound of a telephone ringing could be heard deep within the Peterhouse Master’s Lodge. It was Frank Giles on the line. The first edition of the Sunday Times had just gone to press and he was calling from his office where he was having a celebratory drink with his senior colleagues. He was not telephoning to check on Dacre’s doubts – he did not realize they existed – but to ask if the eminent professor would like to pen an essay dismissing the sceptics for the following week’s paper. Giles’s glass-clinking audience froze as they realized the telephone conversation was moving from cheery salutation to staccato interjections and then to longer pauses. The colour drained from Giles’s cheeks as he said, ‘But these doubts aren’t strong enough to make you do a complete 180-degree turn on that?… Oh. I see. You are doing a 180-degree turn.’ Having been leaning against the wall, Brian MacArthur started sliding slowly down it.[15]

After a quick council of war, MacArthur got through to Murdoch in New York to seek his sanction to stop the presses. But the proprietor, having placed credence on Dacre’s original endorsement, was cutting about his eleventh-hour doubts and told MacArthur to publish. He should have added ‘and be damned’; 1.4 million copies rolled under the banner headline ‘WORLD EXCLUSIVE: How the diaries of the Führer were found in an East German hayloft’.[16]

Frank Giles was distinctly unhappy to discover that neither Douglas-Home nor Colin Webb had passed on Dacre’s doubts during the vital hours of Saturday 23 April. When he demanded an explanation, Douglas-Home claimed Dacre had been in such a ‘condition of doubt and perturbation’ that it had been difficult to gauge exactly what his opinion had been on that day. Giles later concluded:

Like Murdoch, he [Douglas-Home] too seems to have become so immersed in the business of wanting the diaries to be genuine that he was unable to face the possibility that they were not. The rub for me that fateful Saturday was that it was I and the Sunday Times, not Douglas-Home and The Times, who had to pay the price for his clouded judgment.[17]

If Dacre’s doubts had made an impression upon Douglas-Home, he was carefully concealing it under his patrician demeanour. On the Sunday evening, Robert Fisk went off to a press award dinner at the Savoy accompanied by his Finnish girlfriend, an air hostess with SAS Airlines. A fluent German speaker, she had been reading the diary extracts in the morning paper and was adamant that they were forgeries – Hitler simply did not express himself in the phraseology used, she insisted. The original German was all wrong. As the dinner got underway, Douglas-Home arrived wearing a jacket that he claimed had once belonged to the Kaiser. He pulled up a chair and sat down next to Fisk and his girlfriend. She assured him that he was making a big mistake and that the diaries were forgeries. The editor of The Times brushed aside the air hostess’s analysis ‘no, no I can tell you, they smell of history,’ he repeated.[18]

Meanwhile, while the public waded through page after page of Sunday Times analysis and brief extracts of Hitler’s views on Hess, Chamberlain, Himmler and others, Dacre caught a flight to Hamburg accompanied by Paul Eddy, Anthony Terry and Brian MacArthur, who would act as minders and would ensure that if he had anything to denounce in public he should save it for the front page of the following week’s Sunday Times. Dacre was to dine with the Stern executives in the evening as their guest of honour. But he went first to see Gerd Heidemann. When the reporter refused to disclose the identity of the Wehrmacht officer in whose possession the diaries had supposedly rested for the past thirty-eight years, Dacre turned the conversation into an interrogation that ended with Heidemann storming out. Over dinner, Dacre was astonished to discover that Peter Koch claimed not to know the handler’s identity either. Could these methodical Germans really have taken so much on trust? It was one thing not to disclose one’s sources, quite another not to know who the sources were in the first place. Dacre was taken aback, but did not reveal his hand to his hosts. Afterwards, he came across Sir Nicholas Henderson (Britain’s former Ambassador to Bonn and Washington) in the hotel bar. ‘Nico’ offered an old friend some advice – the diaries were clearly fake and the sooner he denounced them publicly the better. Dacre decided to sleep on it.[19]

The next morning, Stern’s press conference commenced in hubristic triumph. There was an introductory film presentation then the sixty volumes of diaries were theatrically brought in procession towards the front of the hall. Flashlights blazed away. Twenty-seven television crews jostled for space alongside swarms of newspaper journalists. It was the very definition of a world ‘media circus’. Then the platform party introduced Dacre to the press – and the smooth operation began to fall apart. As the Stern management listened with mounting horror, he confessed he had been misled about the diaries having been positively traced all the way back to the plane crash. Stern should have scented trouble – of which Brian MacArthur and Michael Binyon had a sniff – by the fact that the press conference’s start had been delayed because of Dacre’s late appearance (he had initially locked himself in his hotel room and had refused to come out).[20] Douglas-Home had telephoned him that morning and forcefully advised him that ‘so long as there was any chance that the diaries might prove genuine’ he should not formally denounce their authenticity.[21] In consequence, he veered between restating ‘the provisional conclusion that these documents are genuine’ and raising the possibility that their authenticity was ‘shaky’, adding, ‘As a historian, I regret that the normal method of historical verification has, perhaps necessarily, been to some extent sacrificed to the requirements of a journalistic scoop.’ This fired the starter gun for a descent into anarchy. From the floor, David Irving denounced the diaries. The Stern organizers tried to switch off his microphone. Furiously scribbling down the scene for The Times from his vantage point in the hall, Binyon observed that, ‘As a throng of cameramen and reporters pressed round Mr Irving, a fight broke out when Stern’s staff tried to prevent Mr Irving giving a rival press conference in the same room. The hubbub lasted for some time.’[22]

The Times was now moving in tandem with Lord Dacre – which is to say that it was back-pedalling fast. It seemed odd that Stern had deployed The Times’s expert at their press conference. Where was their reputable historian? Who was their authenticator? The Times started giving equal coverage to both sides of the debate. The letters’ page began to fill up. Immanuel Jakobovits, the Chief Rabbi, wrote to express his disgust at the ‘mercenary exploitation’ which would allow Hitler to justify his crimes, adding, ‘In the name of decency, morality and truth, I call upon men of good will everywhere to prevent this proposed affront to the past and depraved threat to the future.’ Those less persuaded that they were about to hear Fascism’s authentic voice took a more whimsical view. Pointing to the fact the diaries comprised sixty identically bound volumes, one correspondent wondered if Hitler had benefited from a ‘large order’ discount when making his purchase, while another asked whether there was no identifiable fingerprint on any of the pages. Michael Holroyd wanted to know what efforts Stern had made to seek out ‘Herr Hitler’s copyright holders to obtain their permission to publish and negotiate fees?’.[23]

It would have taken only three days for Stern to get the paper and ink of the diaries comprehensively tested. Instead, only half-hearted attempts at verification had been made. The failure to undertake a proper scientific examination was explained away on the grounds that doing so risked news of the diaries’ existence leaking out and ruining the scoop. But once the story was in the public domain the requests to undertake proper testing could not be refused. On 6 May, the results came in. There were factual errors and a handwriting expert demonstrated inconsistencies with the real Hitler’s style. But what proved conclusive was the discovery that the paper used for the diaries contained a whitener created in 1955 while the ink had been applied within the past two years. Thus the diaries were incontrovertibly fraudulent. As soon as the news reached London, News International issued a press release that stated, ‘The Sunday Times accepts the report of the German archivists’ and would, consequently, be dropping its serialization. There was no mention of The Times’s original role and press rivals chose to focus on the Sunday Times where Frank Giles had gone off on holiday leaving Hugo Young to pen a much derided note of ‘sincere apology’ to ‘our readers’. Not unnaturally, rival newspapers had great fun at the Sunday Times’s expense, many concluding that it was the price paid for being owned by the likes of Rupert Murdoch. The proprietor himself showed extraordinary sang-froid about the whole matter. Charles Wilson was with him when the news was brought to him that the diaries had been confirmed as forgeries. Murdoch digested the news and paused, lost in thought. There was absolute silence. After a moment he made his only comment. ‘Well,’ he mused, ‘you can’t win them all.’[24]

The Times reported with measured detachment the news of the forgery on its front page but no leading article ever appeared on the subject. When Robert Harris’s compelling book on the subject, Selling Hitler, was published in 1986, the Times Literary Supplement was the only News International publication to review it (Professor Norman Stone considering it ‘a very funny story … very well told’). Harris’s account was subsequently made into a television series with Alan Bennett playing Lord Dacre and, yet more improbably, Barry Humphries swapping the persona of the Melbourne society housewife Dame Edna Everage for Rupert Murdoch.

In their defence, Times Newspapers and Lord Dacre could point to the extent to which the supposedly reputable Stern had deceived them. The tone of certainty expressed in The Times on 23 April rested not only on Dacre’s overhasty pronouncement but on the claims by Stern that ‘it had conducted chemical analyses of the paper and ink’ that showed them to be appropriate to the period. Without this false assurance, neither Dacre, Douglas-Home nor Murdoch might have been quite so quick to part with their reputations and their money. Nonetheless, at a personal level, it was Dacre who lost most from the episode. He had recanted his authentication days before the scientific tests had determined the diaries’ fate. By contrast, David Irving, who had done much to improve his intellectual standing by initially denouncing the hoax had, by then, come round to supporting the diaries authenticity, possibly because they did not implicate the Führer closely in the Holocaust. Irving, however, was a maverick with recognized extremist views. It was Dacre who had a valuable reputation to lose. In the immediate aftermath he claimed to feel ‘like an Arabian adulterer, pinioned in the sand and awaiting the next, perhaps fatal, volley of stones’. He tried not to cast the blame elsewhere, later telling Graham Turner, ‘I wanted to protect Douglas-Home and, in any case, it would have been undignified. I assumed that the other people involved would admit their errors.’ To his disappointment he found that “the only person who behaved quite well in it all was Rupert – he did send me a genuine, if private, letter accepting part of the blame’.[25]

In accepting the request to look at the diaries, Dacre had sought to do The Times a favour, an act of charity that rebounded against him. His reputation was battered – to the ill-disguised merriment of much of his academic peer group. After he retired from Peterhouse, waspish undergraduates there gathered once a term to commemorate his Mastership by founding a dining club called ‘The Authenticators’. Some dons joined in as guests. Given his various and distinguished career it was a needlessly ungracious final act when The Times announced his death on 27 January 2003 under the page two headline ‘Hitler diary hoax victim Lord Dacre dies at 89’.[26] It was not how he would have wished to have been remembered, especially from a newspaper upon whose board he had diligently sat between 1974 and 1988. Yet, those at Gray’s Inn Road had grounds for feeling he had landed them in a huge mess. However rushed he may have felt in being asked for an opinion, there was no need for him to express such certainty on the basis of only an afternoon looking at manuscripts he could scarcely read. Sadly, because of this he did end up performing the role of useful scapegoat, thereby deflecting criticism from The Times’s editorial decision making.

Gerd Heidemann protested he did not realize the diaries were fakes. Nonetheless, he was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison for embezzling a large share of the money Stern had paid out through him to what they believed was the diaries’ custodian. The custodian was the forger, Konrad Kujau, who appeared to enjoy the attention accorded him in the courthouse and, between sessions, found time to joke with Michael Binyon: suggesting that if he’d known earlier the Bonn correspondent was from The Times, he would have knocked off some forged diaries especially for the paper. He was sentenced to four years and six months but released after serving three years. Seeking to build upon his minor celebrity status, he ran (unsuccessfully) to succeed Manfred Rommel, the son of Hitler’s field marshal, as Mayor of Stuttgart. He subsequently paid for medical treatment by copying great works of art in a Hitlerian style and opened a gallery of his own derivative work. He died in 2000.

In more than thirty years working at The Times, Tim Austin regarded the Hitler diaries as the paper’s most embarrassing episode.[27] Still philosophical about the debacle twenty years later, Murdoch felt rather that ‘the result was a black eye for me. People concentrated on me rather than Charlie’ but that ‘It taught us all to be a lot more cautious … You learn from these mistakes.’[28] Indeed, to the wider public, with Lord Dacre, Rupert Murdoch and the Sunday Times taking most of the flak, The Times escaped with little more than flesh wounds, its initial role largely forgotten. But even the Sunday Times did not suffer commercially: its circulation was 20,000 higher after the fiasco than it had been before. And as for Murdoch, he got his money back.

III

Book reviews had appeared in The Times since its earliest issues (albeit sporadically), but the creation of a separately sold Times Literary Supplement in 1914 encouraged the daily paper to cease providing proper competition. It was not until 1955 that The Times decided to take the task seriously again with the establishment of a regular books page. From then on, book reviews came to be regarded as every bit as essential a component of the paper as the output of the theatre critics. There was no formal collaboration between The Times and the editorially autonomous TLS, but the latter’s interest in fiction, poetry and other more literary works certainly encouraged The Times towards focusing upon non-fiction and, in particular, biography, politics and history. Murdoch’s purchase of Times Newspapers in 1981 gave him not only The Times and the TLS but also a paper whose book reviews had become extremely well regarded – the Sunday Times. This was a formidable combination. In the dailies market during the 1970s, only the FT was recognized as the serious competitor to The Times for the quality of its book reviewing.

During the 1980s, The Times’s literary editor was Philip Howard. His father, Peter Howard, had become the youngest man to captain the England rugby team in 1931 (despite the fact he had been born with a joined foot and knee and spent his childhood wearing a leg iron that prevented him playing contact sport) who subsequently became one of Beaverbrook’s highest paid journalists. He was also a novelist and co-wrote, with Michael Foot and Frank Owen, Guilty Men, the searing indictment on Neville Chamberlain’s Government. He subsequently led the Moral Rearmament Movement. When he died in 1965, seventeen heads of state or prime ministers sent condolences. Philip Howard’s mother was the former Doris Metaxa, the 1932 Wimbledon women’s doubles champion. An Old Etonian and Classics graduate of Trinity College, Oxford, who had served with the Black Watch during his National Service, Philip Howard had been at the paper since 1964 having been offered a job on the condition he proved his Times loyalty by accepting a pay cut from what he had received from his previous employer, the Glasgow Herald. He subsequently demonstrated himself to be not only a fine home news reporter but also a stylist of great élan whose ruminations on the English language proved to be a hugely enjoyed peculiarity of The Times.

The emerging vogue for hiring ‘celebrity reviewers’ was resisted at The Times during the 1980s. Instead, as literary editor, Howard worked with a chief reviewer who was expected to pen the main article each week. In the early 1980s, the paper was able to benefit from the wide range of Michael Ratcliffe (one of Howard’s predecessors as literary editor) in this role. Chief reviewer had been a staff position and, as such, was much envied but when Ratcliffe left the paper in 1982, Howard found a worthy replacement in the philosopher and President of Trinity College, Oxford, Anthony Quinton. The author of Utilitarian Ethics and The Politics of Imperfection, Lord Quinton was also a master of the reviewing art (save for one mistakenly, well-intentioned decision to show his review on a Schopenhauer book to its author prior to publication – resulting in a lawyer’s letter attempting to block it). But the demands of a weekly book review eventually proved too great a restriction for someone with Quinton’s buzy diary. In 1984, Howard appointed a successor in James Fenton. From his early twenties, Fenton had thrown himself into the literary and journalistic world, maintaining an impressive output in both and later becoming Professor of Poetry at Oxford. His reviews were incisive and often tart. On one occasion he dismissed a book on Renaissance festivals by Roy Strong, the V&A’s director and prolific writer on courtly and horticultural themes, as having been breathlessly written ‘in a tone of voice that does rather too often remind us of Alan Whicker’.[29] When Fenton escaped to the Philippines and the Independent, the distinguished writer and biographer Peter Ackroyd admirably filled his shoes.

During the 1980s, several of Britain’s most famous independent publishers were merged and swallowed up into larger conglomerates. Many of the new parent companies were American. To the fore in this respect were Random House and Murdoch’s own HarperCollins (a merger of the American Harper & Row with the Scottish Collins). Big was also thought to be beautiful in the high street where new bookshop chains such as Waterstones and Dillons spread across the country. Opinion divided between those who welcomed the money these innovations brought into publishing and bookselling and those who believed such commercialism contaminated the purity of the product. What was undoubtedly true was that quantity increased noticeably, with more books published than ever before. It remained the task of The Times books page to sift through for the quality. In this quest, Philip Howard stood determinedly against the subtle bullying of the book industry. He had little time for best-seller lists. He thought they could be easily manipulated by the strategies of publishing houses and, in any case, were usually dominated by the sort of cookery books, lifestyle manuals and showbiz memoirs that rarely made much impact on the paper’s literary pages. He successfully resisted Harold Evans’s suggestion that a weekly list should appear. Perhaps more importantly, Howard did not share the Thatcherite zeal increasingly animating The Times’s more forthright columnists and leader writers as the decade progressed. At one stage, he had to make a spirited stand to stop Douglas-Home shoe-horning Woodrow Wyatt, a long-standing friend of Murdoch and confidant of the Prime Minister, into the post of chief reviewer. A compromise was reached that allowed Wyatt to review regularly but not to the exclusion of the lit. ed.’s preferred choices. Indeed, wherever possible, Howard encouraged a counter-culture of alternative voices on the books page. He also fostered younger writers of promise. Among the literary figures of note who reviewed frequently were Richard Holmes, Victoria Glendinning, Isabel Raphael and later, Sabine Durrant and Sarah Edworthy. Without diminishing the interest in history and biography, every effort was made to ensure new fiction received sufficient coverage, despite the difficulty of spotting which first-time novelists were worthy of attention. But the popular end of the market was not snubbed. Harry Keating, Tim Heald and Marcel Berlins regularly harvested the high-yielding crops of crime and thrillers in a quick and incisive round-up format.

While Howard shouldered the responsibilities of the books pages throughout the 1980s, Irving Wardle did likewise for the theatre reviews, bringing down the curtain on thirty-four years since he started writing for The Times (and as chief drama critic since 1963) in December 1989. Rescued from ‘a life of skivvying’ in a hotel by John Lawrence (arts editor of The Times, 1950–69),[30] the Wadham-educated Wardle had spent much of his subsequent career as an enthusiastic supporter of the new generation of playwrights, most famously John Osborne, who challenged what they saw as a staid theatrical Establishment. Wardle looked with favour upon their attempts to say on stage what had formally been mumbled in private. Many of the leading directors of the sixties and seventies were fading away during the eighties and the acting giants of the previous generation – Olivier, Redgrave, Richardson, Gielgud – died or retired. Some promising ventures, like Jonathan Miller’s arrival as artistic director at the Old Vic, were stillborn, with Miller departing after a season. However, the emergence of Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett and Peter Nichols as writers of the first rank was more positive, as was the staging of plays by Racine and Corneille, dramatists whose work had previously been thought unadaptable in English. Other foreign influences came from the Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa and the Canadian Robert Le Page. The latter’s Trilogy of the Dragon encouraged comparisons with the celebrated directorial debut of Peter Brook.

A major development was the increasing tendency towards theatre of fact, in which plays were inspired or influenced by real lives – such as the death of Steve Biko or T. S. Eliot’s first marriage as interpreted in Michael Hastings’s Tom and Viv. In this respect even Murdoch and The Times provided inspiration (of a sort) for David Hare and Howard Brenton whose Pravda Wardle bravely gave a broadly favourable review.[31] His critical impressions were not always those of the broader public. Reviewing Trevor Nunn’s direction of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats when it opened, Wardle felt it ‘never succeeds in taking fire into an organic work’ and deprecated ‘an extremely sickly poem called “Memory” (the only textual departure from Eliot) – an attempt to press the poems into the service of Mr Nunn’s warm-hearted style of community theatre’.[32] Cats closed in London twentyone years later by which time it was the second highest-grossing musical of all time (after Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera). ‘Memory’ had received more than two million airplays on US radio stations by 1998 alone.[33] Wardle was a fair-minded critic. This was not always the same as being a chronicler of popular tastes.

Between 1983 and 1985 the deputy theatre critic, Anthony Masters, assisted Wardle. By any measure, Masters was a brilliant young man. He had been Senior Scholar at Winchester and a Scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, going down with a First in Classics. For The Times, he wrote reviews with the wit, enthusiasm and assurance of youth. He appeared to have a brilliant future ahead of him. On the night of 2 January 1985 he filed a review of Peter Coe’s adaptation of Great Expectations at the Old Vic. The play had gone on for four hours and Masters ended his piece: ‘I sympathized with the father I overheard telling his son, “Theatrical performances are usually shorter than this.” At least, they usually seem so.’[34] These proved to be Masters’s last words for the next day he was found dead at his home. He was thirty-six. Even for the most accomplished craftsmen, writing reviews to a nightly deadline was an immensely demanding task. Masters had found it difficult getting to sleep after he had filed and had started taking medication to help him drift off. The late running of Great Expectations had created extra pressure, leaving him only half an hour to write his review. Getting to sleep afterwards would be a great difficulty. The assumption was that he took a greater dose than usual – one from which he never awoke.

David Robinson was The Times’s film critic from 1975 to 1990. During the 1970s, the British film industry had all but collapsed. In 1980 a mere thirty-two native feature films were produced. And then, suddenly, a fight back commenced. On its release in 1981, Robinson identified Chariots of Fire as ‘in most respects the kind of picture for which we have been looking in British cinema in vain for many years’ although he found fault with aspects of it, especially the ‘rather out-modish’ slow-motion shots of Eric Liddell running with his head flung back. This, in fact, proved to be one of the abiding images from British film making in the eighties. It was also the first British film since 1968 to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, giving false hope to those who shared the aspirations of its scriptwriter, Colin Welland, who collected his Oscar with the fateful boast, ‘The British are coming!’ For a moment it looked possible. Gandhi and The Killing Fields followed successfully in the wake. Withnail & I would, over time, attain cult status. The creation of Channel 4, with its own film production arm, promised and delivered much. By 1985, British feature film production had risen to eighty releases. But the triumphs were soon shown to be sporadic, with the achievements usually resting more on British acting talent, only sometimes on production or direction and rarely on home funding. One such example came in 1986, when Robinson rightly identified the sumptuous Merchant – Ivory film A Room With a View as a ‘masterpiece’.[35] At a time when other European governments were lavishing funds on their film industries, the British Government decided to scrap the capital allowance tax relief that allowed for the writing off of production deficits. Almost immediately investment in the British film industry dried up, falling from £300 million in 1985 to £64.5 million in 1989. Meanwhile, Hollywood cleaned up at the box office with a succession of comic or adventure blockbusters (with multiple sequels) industrially churned out for the teenage market. Robinson struggled to conceal his boredom with so many of the decade’s major commercial hits – an output that could be summed up by the success of Friday the 13th (Part 8).

On the small screen, Channel 4’s launch in November 1982 was the major event in British broadcasting. The first national terrestrial channel since BBC 2 eighteen years earlier, Channel 4’s birth was a precarious one. It arrived in the midst of an advertising recession and an industrial dispute that ensured a screen card rather than commercials filled many of the breaks between its programmes. Nonetheless, in an eve-of-launch preview in The Times, the new channel’s chief executive, Jeremy Isaacs, brimmed with high-minded enthusiasm, assuring Peter Lennon that ‘Channel 4 is the last Reithean Channel! Reithean!’ On the evidence of the first day’s broadcasts – a mixture of quiz shows, soap operas, comedy and a drama about a mentally ill patient – The Times’s television critic, Peter Ackroyd, believed it would prove to be ‘the SDP of television, mouthing the rhetoric of fashion or of commitment while in fact offering approximately the same material as the other three channels’ before settling down ‘perhaps as a slightly down-market BBC 2 (if BBC 2 is not itself already the down-market BBC 2)’.[36]

In trumpeting the public service role of Channel 4, Isaacs claimed ‘we have six years while the cable people are still digging holes in the ground to impose ourselves’. But a greater challenge would emerge more quickly from satellite television. This was to be another of Murdoch’s great gambles. Months of hostile press speculation that Murdoch was orchestrating The Times’s criticism of aspects of the BBC and the future of its licence fee in order to promote his Sky satellite company came to a head in a speech by Alasdair Milne, the BBC’s director-general. Before an audience of the TV and Radio Industries Club in January 1985, he posed the question: ‘Who is the more likely to serve the public interest, the BBC or The Times, whose recommendations if acted upon would have the practical effect of enabling its owner Rupert Murdoch to acquire some of the most valuable broadcasting action in the UK?’ Douglas-Home was not amused by this apparent slur on his editorial independence and organized a meeting with Milne to repudiate his imputations. He also asked the independent national directors of Times Newspapers to investigate Milne’s claims.[37] When the directors asked Milne for a statement he backtracked, admitting, ‘I do not of course have the concrete evidence for which you ask because I do not work for The Times. The inference I drew from the paper’s behaviour over the BBC seemed a reasonable one, and I was not alone in drawing it. But the Editor’s explanation was sufficient to lay my fears to rest.’ With editor and proprietor both denying collusion, the independent directors had little option but to conclude that there was no evidence to support Milne’s innuendo.[38] Hostile entities were less convinced. When the NUJ made its submission to the Peacock Inquiry into the BBC’s future funding, it drew attention to the The Times’s attacks on the BBC and stated, ‘we find it hard to believe, despite Mr Murdoch’s denials, that this attitude is unconnected with his own commercial interests in broadcasting’.[39]

The Times’s problem throughout the period of its ownership by Rupert Murdoch was that few people outside the paper’s editorial office appeared to believe the proprietor honoured his pledges not to interfere in its editorial policy. Murdoch backed Margaret Thatcher, took a tough stance against the Soviet Union and resented the restrictive practices of both left-leaning trade unions and professional vested interests. That this was also The Times’s general editorial line appeared suspicious. The paper’s outlook was, in reality, the world view of Charles Douglas-Home and those with whom he surrounded himself. Unlike Evans, plucked to edit from outside the paper by Murdoch, Douglas-Home had become editor primarily because he enjoyed the confidence of the overwhelming majority of the newspaper’s senior staff. He was very far from being parachuted in by the proprietor. Indeed, no editor in the first twenty years of News International’s ownership of The Times had grounds for feeling as secure in his post and unconcerned about annoying the proprietor as the socially self-assured Douglas-Home. As we shall see later, it was his successors who would have greater difficulty convincing sceptics that any favourable reference to a programme that appeared on Sky or – when Murdoch’s interests spread to Asia – any comment that fell short of ringing condemnation of the Chinese government was not directly, or indirectly, a consequence of the proprietor’s views and business interests.

A secondary charge was that if Murdoch did not interfere directly in the editorial line of the newspaper it was because, with the right-wing Douglas-Home in the chair, he did not need to do so. Certainly there was little to cause the proprietor tremendous offence in the leader column where a barrage was kept up not only against the Soviet Union but also against what the Prime Minister infamously referred to as ‘the enemy within’ – militant trade unions. There was much less Thatcherite zeal among the paper’s reporters. The labour editor was Paul Routledge, a straight-talking Yorkshireman and son of a railway worker who had come to The Times in 1971 via grammar school, Nottingham University and the Sheffield Telegraph. A man of firm socialist convictions, he was acknowledged as one of the journalists with the best sources on the paper. Within Gray’s Inn Road, he had won widespread respect not only for the professionalism of his work but also for his steadfastness as father of the NUJ chapel (a large petition was signed forlornly trying to dissuade him from resigning this post following an incident in which he had responded to goading that he was a pacifist by punching his accuser, Jake Eccelestone, in the face). The miners’ strike of 1984–5 proved to be an exceptionally busy time for him, for he was not a reporter who believed a story could be investigated from the monastic introspection of his office desk. Instead, he embarked on a gruelling year trailing round the disputes’ battlefields and, in making the most of his familiarity with the National Union of Mineworkers leaders, gaining a level of access to the key players that was the envy of rival newspapers. Although the two men were poles apart politically, Douglas-Home had little option but to give Routledge grudging respect. Indeed, Routledge had previously taken him down a coalmine so that he might get a feel for what the miner’s life was like (Douglas-Home appeared to relish the occasion, but was noticeably quiet when Routledge proceeded to take him for a drink in a miners’ social club). Yet, despite the excellence of Routledge’s coverage of the year long dispute, the editor allowed his ideological suspicions to rise to the surface, on one occasion writing Routledge an insulting letter implying that he was not investigating stories relating to the NUM closely enough. The labour editor certainly felt the pressure of working for a paper whose political direction he did not share but he refused to alter the tenor of his reporting. In any case, whatever his differences with the paper’s political comment, he did not care for the middle class student revolutionaries posturing in the Guardian. Importantly, his copy for The Times during the miners’ strike was never spiked or fundamentally altered for political purposes.[40]

In fact, while Routledge was sympathetic to the miners’ plight and respected hard-left union leaders like the Scottish Communist Mick McGahey, he had little time for Arthur Scargill who he regarded as a self-serving egoist. When an article in the Daily Express identified Routledge as one of Scargill’s ‘tried and tested cronies’ who ‘flit, almost unnoticed, in and out of the union’s Sheffield headquarters, giving their advice and help’ and ‘flattering and applauding him’, both Routledge and The Times sued. Not only did the article wrongly state that he was ghost writing the NUM leader’s autobiography, it implied he was misusing his position at The Times to ‘keep the Scargill show on the road’. The Express ended up printing an unqualified apology and writing Routledge a cheque (some of the proceeds of which eventually found its way to miners’ causes).[41]

If any one publication did most to undermine the belief that The Times was an editorially independent newspaper, it was Harold Evans’s account of his period in Gray’s Inn Road, Good Times, Bad Times. Published in late 1983, a year and a half after its author’s sacking, it was precisely the ammunition Murdoch’s critics sought. There were those who thought it inappropriate that Evans should rush into print against a man who had just given him what all agreed was a very generous pay-off.[42] But given the gravity of the book’s most important claim – that Murdoch had wielded the knife because Evans would not bow to his ways, even involving the Prime Minister in a ruse to get Evans an alternative job at the Sports Council – there was no shortage of interested readers. It was launched to a fanfare of publishing hype – embargoes, a press conference and a largely supportive one-hour Channel 4 programme, Bad Times at The Times, presented by Melvyn Bragg. It led to demands in the House of Commons for a debate on whether the terms on which Murdoch had bought the paper had been breached. Many were happy to accept it as the authoritative account of the fall of Britain’s most celebrated editor and, with him, the integrity of an illustrious newspaper. In contrast, the protestations of those Times staff who did not recognize Evans’s portrayal were easily dismissed as the self-serving statements of those still on the News International payroll. Aware that its failure to give Evans’s book adequate publicity would lend credence to its claims, The Times did not stint on reporting the furore it created and Good Times, Bad Times was dispassionately reviewed on the books page by Gordon Newton. A distinguished former editor of the FT, Newton took the view that ‘the life of an editor on a daily paper with its remorseless day by day fight against time is intolerable without the full support of staff and management’ and – echoing what Murdoch himself had told staff from the first – the only sure way to a newspaper’s independence was in its ability to return a profit. Newton concluded that, ‘the story Evans tells is a sorry one from which few if any emerge with credit’.[43] It was certainly bad press for the paper.

It was not just the political slant of the paper that many believed was influenced by the owner. The launch of an upmarket form of bingo in The Times in 1984 provided further ammunition for those who felt Murdoch was having a cheapening influence on the newspaper’s demeanour. The bingo war in the tabloid press had started in 1981 with the Daily Star and had been sufficiently successful to panic the Sun and its great rival, the Daily Mirror, into following suit. Before long, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail had entered the fray. Three years later the bingo war was renewed with added ferocity, each of the tabloids promising regular £1 million winners. Not all could prosper in a circulation battle determined by competitive prize money inflation and Murdoch’s Sun triumphed over the Mirror. It seemed a propitious moment for his other most famous title to be the first broadsheet to try something similar.

The principal objective was, of course, to boost circulation, but The Times risked undermining its reputation by offering bingo cards wedged between Bernard Levin and business news. For the gimmick to work, it had to be portrayed as something more highbrow. In the previous three years, various half-baked ideas had been floated. Harold Evans had passed onto Murdoch a number of these, including the outline for a competition in which readers would send in their opinions on various subjects together with a £1 fee that went into a kitty payable to the reader ‘who, on the same form, has most nearly forecast what British public opinion thinks. The ingenious point of this is that one gets an opinion poll for free and a competition at the same time.’ The ingenious point was lost on the proprietor. Apart from anything else, Murdoch ‘felt uneasy about The Times taking money from readers in a competition’.[44] Evans, however, had another idea to pass on. In July 1981 he wrote to Murdoch to tell him that a solicitor friend who acted for the football pools ‘suggests that we run an investment pool in The Times business news in which we ask people to predict the performance of various shares over the week’. By October, a putative and decidedly non-bingo-style title for the game had been devised – ‘portfolio’. But with the crisis in Gray’s Inn Road intensifying, the idea was put aside. It was not until the summer of 1984 that the name was resurrected for what would be a different share price-based competition. By then, Britain’s improving economy and rising stock exchange index ensured it suddenly appeared to be cleverly in tune with the national Zeitgeist.

Portfolio was launched on 25 June 1984. Readers were issued with a game card with eight numbers on it, the idea being to match the numbers with the share movements of a list of forty companies listed on The Times’s prices page. Prizes of £2000 would be given away, with a £20,000 bonus on Saturday to lift sales on the day of the week when circulation was traditionally at its lowest. There was no certainty that the concept would appeal to readers, or, more importantly, potential readers. The paper’s executives were nervous and it was launched only on a thirteen-week trial basis. Some £1.5 million was invested. Publicity and promotion were paramount. Television advertisements were broadcast featuring a pinstripe-suited and bowler-hatted Mel Smith, one of the comedians on the popular Not The Nine O’Clock News sketch show. Two million game cards, designed and shaped to look like a credit card, were distributed. The Sunday Times for the day before the game’s launch carried extensive advertising together with the first game cards in an envelope, ensuring that the majority of Sunday Times readers who did not normally read The Times were directly targeted. Cash prizes for the newsagents who supplied the winners encouraged shopkeepers to push Portfolio upon their customers.[45]

The unease among Times executives over whether it would capture the public’s imagination was matched by disquiet among journalists over the very idea of running such a gimmick. Following a meeting of the NUJ chapel, it was decreed that no journalist was prepared to write any ‘news item’ promoting it. In the event, the first winner proved suitably newsworthy and ideal for the paper’s attempts to stay ‘upmarket’: Erik Feldman, a seventeen-year-old at Harrow School. The front page showed him being held aloft by fellow pupils waving their boaters and the accompanying (unattributed) article informed readers that The Times was the most read newspaper among current Harrovians.[46] This was exactly the sort of puff dressed up as news that many sceptical journalists feared.

Much of the rest of Fleet Street reacted to The Times’s descent into City bingo with a mixture of amusement and faux head shaking that a once great newspaper had sunk so low. ‘It is too painful even to discuss what has become of “The Thunderer” ’ opined the Daily Mail. ‘Let’s just say it’s a good top people’s comic.’ With a little more mirth, the Observer drew attention to The Times’s attempts to dress up the game as if it was something respectable and wondered when the paper would be launching a ‘Spot the Grouse’ competition or a new page three ‘Legal Lovelies’ (complete with their briefs, of course). In fact, The Times had rather more form in the area of promotional gimmickry that those who put it all down to the supposedly populist tastes of the Australian owner realized. Throughout the 1970s, the newspaper had dreamed up competitions inadequately masked by an embarrassing veneer of literary pretence: in 1970 it was ‘Rhyme for The Times’; in 1972 there was a competition to write a Christmas carol that mentioned six of the advertisers featured in the paper’s festive gift guide (the commercialization of Christmas came early that year) and, most contrived of all, a ‘teaser’ to nominate an appropriate present for three members of the March family in Little Women while selecting a quotation from either Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations or the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations that best summed up the choices. Given this pedigree, Portfolio appeared refreshingly honest.

Perhaps surprisingly, the two newspapers that refrained from a full-scale assault on Portfolio were The Times’s principal rivals, the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. They were perhaps conscious of the danger of giving it publicity and aware of the possibility that, if it worked, they might end up having to try something similar themselves. The Times had been closing its circulation gap with the Guardian over the course of the past two years. Yet Guardian readers did not desert in droves in order to play a bowler-hat version of bingo and sales of the left-leaning paper were dented by only seven thousand in the first six months after Portfolio’s launch.[47] Where the game did help The Times gain ground was against the market-leading Daily Telegraph. This emphasized a trend that was already apparent before the promotion was launched. Indeed, The Times had been slowly gaining ground almost continuously since Murdoch had bought the paper and in the summer of 1983 had benefited from a £1.5 million television advertising campaign. In the year to June 1984 (before the launch of Portfolio), The Times’s circulation rose 13 per cent against a broadsheet average of 3 per cent. This surge was well timed to take advantage of the improving economic health of the country. Net advertising revenue was up 31 per cent with display advertising volume increasing by more than a third. Times Newspapers was still trading at a post-tax loss but the gap was closing and, for once, it was partly due to improved finances at The Times.[48]

The Times’s average daily sale in the six months before Portfolio’s launch was 381,000. In the first six months after the game commenced, the average soared by 20 per cent to 457,000. In the first half of 1985 it rose further to 480,000 where, despite the decision to continue with the game, it reached a plateau. This was an extraordinary achievement, particularly since it augmented what was already a period of sustained improvement in the paper’s circulation. The result was that, three years after Douglas-Home assumed the editorship, the paper had gained nearly 180,000 extra sales, an increase of 60 per cent on the position he inherited in the autumn of 1981. Having been first overtaken by the Guardian in 1962, The Times was back in second place in Britain’s broadsheet sales. Indeed, its circulation was now at the highest in its two hundred year history. Even those who disliked the manner in which the increase had, in part, been attained could not hold back from a measure of rejoicing at this simple fact. Nonetheless, there was room for caution: it remained to be seen whether ‘Portfolio’ was gaining readers for the paper who, impressed by the accompanying journalistic content, would convert permanently once the game was dropped. What, if there was one, was the paper’s post-Portfolio strategy?

In planning ahead, The Times found itself asking a familiar question – should it push for more readers and challenge the Daily Telegraph for dominance of the broadsheet market, or refrain from stretching itself further and entrench itself around its core readership and its historic role as the journal for predominately London-based ‘top people’. The latter option had the advantage that it would involve less change to the essential character of the newspaper and took account of the fact that the more lucrative advertisers preferred to target papers whose readers had the most disposable income. Unfortunately, from the 1960s onwards, this A-B social category had been targeted with increasing effectiveness by the FT. But there were problems too with the going for growth option. When Roy Thomson bought The Times in 1966 he had decided that the answer lay with expansion. Policies were enacted that ensured circulation duly rose from just over 250,000 in 1965 to 430,000 in 1969. Financially, the consequences were disastrous. Advertisers were not interested in targeting the nation’s undergraduates. Thus, while the advertising rates failed to generate the anticipated return, higher promotion and production costs ensured that each 6d copy of The Times cost Thomson two shillings to produce. This was an unsustainable policy and the paper had to be allowed to fall back towards a third of a million daily sales. Unfortunately, this switch did not ensure a return to profitability either and Murdoch was not the sort of proprietor who was content to act merely as custodian of a crumbling monument. While acknowledging the problems Thomson had met when he attempted expansion, the paper, it seemed, had little option but to go once again for growth. Portfolio was the motor for this, but it was accompanied by a decision to attract additional custom by keeping the cover price low. In 1980, Thomson’s sale prospectus for The Times had suggested that the paper would have a cover price of thirty-five pence by April 1983. Yet, News International opted to hold it at twenty pence until February 1985 when a modest three pence was added to the price.

The Douglas-Home Times sought to maintain traditional standards, but with sharper news focus, broader coverage and a popular game all for a below-market price. This was clearly a growth rather than retrenchment strategy. The problem was that Gray’s Inn Road had hit a production ceiling set by technical difficulties and union restrictive practices that resulted in terrible distribution. Unless these issues could be sorted out, further expansion was impossible.

Ironically, it was a decision to modernize that had made matters worse. Since its first edition in 1785, The Times, like all successive papers, had been typeset in hot metal. In 1975, Thomson had taken the decision to move to computer-set photocomposition. Six years elapsed attempting to put that decision into practice. The process finally got underway during Harold Evans’s editorship and, by the time Douglas-Home took the chair, almost all the paper was computer-set. On the night of 30 April 1982 and accompanied by the strains of a bagpipe, the last page ever produced by hot metal received its ‘banging out’. The Times duly became the first national broadsheet to have an entirely electronic composing room. In this it was four years ahead of the Telegraph and Guardian and six years ahead of the FT.[49]

The results were dire. By the summer of 1982, ten thousand copies a day were being lost due to the problems photocomposition created. During May, not a single paper caught the 10.45 p.m. train to the Northeast while Scotland and Wales received an intermittent service and the sight of a copy in Belfast or Dublin before mid-morning became a unifying spectacle of rarity. On some days, the entire distribution for Europe (nine thousand copies a day) had to be cancelled due to the lateness of the papers leaving Gray’s Inn Road. It was a shambles. The unions had retained their ‘closedshop’ control over those who keyed in the text. Despite a full programme of training, many proved to be not overly dexterous. There was little attempt to accommodate management’s requirements. One hundred and fifty-five typesetters were employed in the composing room and in August fifty-four of them were simultaneously on holiday.[50] Even at other times those that were at their keyboards were supposed to proofread what they were keying in, but they were getting so late in finishing that their only chance of meeting the deadline was to skip the checking stage. Hiring additional proofreaders to stand over the typesetters would have turned the ‘new technology’ into a yet more labour-intensive one. The result was that only a quarter of the paper was being properly proofread, with the law reports, leaders, court and features getting priority and the news pages coming last.[51] Bill O’Neill had to be recalled to sort it out. In the meantime, readers had to put up with an extraordinary number of spelling and other mistakes in the paper, all of which undermined its reputation for accuracy. If The Times was to be believed, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was someone called ‘Sir Howe’, the Prime Minister regularly ‘mad a statement to the Commons’ and her Education Secretary was a ‘Fellow of All Saints’.[52] These embarrassing errors were compounded by ongoing production problems in the print hall that left some editions so far out of register that text and pictures were blurred. It was all a bit unfortunate for a paper being promoted with the advertising slogan, ‘The Times puts it all in focus’.[53]

The production problems had become so acute that Douglas-Home told his management colleagues he was frankly amazed the paper’s circulation was going up and that the biggest problem was ‘getting the paper out at all’.[54] Moving to computer-set composition certainly brought change to the print hall. The hot-metal process had involved printing from metal chases. It was now replaced by a more complicated system. Computer printouts of text were cut and pasted into place on a page-make-up board in the composing room. The pasted-up pages were photographed onto a sensitized polymer that was used to create a plastic mould. This was baked into a curved shape for casting the metal plates that were clamped onto the print rolls. By 1984, engineers in the print hall were ready to run plastic plates from the rollers. NGA members, however, refused and thus the plastic plates had to be cast back into metal for fixing onto the machines the NGA members operated. If The Times wanted to expand the print run, it had not only to sort out the technical problems but also to get its printers to work more productively. In 1983 the unions had finally agreed to print 420,000 copies per night. This total was usually reached well within time and sometimes within two hours of the end of the printers’ night shift. But when management asked the unions to keep printing additional copies until their allotted shift was up (rather than merely going home early) the unions demanded more money. The boost Portfolio gave to circulation thus proved expensive, not only in terms of promotion and prize money but also in forcing up the cost of printing an additional half a million copies each night. Ultimately, it encouraged the search for an expanded and less expensive means of printing a bigger and supposedly better paper. This was the road that led inexorably to Fortress Wapping.

IV

Charles Douglas-Home was an editor in a hurry. In the year before he took the chair, he had been afflicted by increasingly severe back pains. At first, it was thought he had slipped a disc but within a year of taking the chair he was diagnosed terminally ill with bone cancer. For as long as it was possible to conceal it, he did not share the news with colleagues. It was not in his make-up to desert his post just because he was in his mid-forties. In 1985, The Times would celebrate its bicentenary and he wanted to be there to see it.

The editor was not without support. He had a close and loving family life. He was fortified by a strong Christian faith. Certainly, he was bolstered by capable senior colleagues and, as his health began visibly to degenerate, it was they who carried much of the burden of ensuring business as normal at Gray’s Inn Road. The editor and, indeed, The Times, were fortunate to have two deputy editors, both appointed in 1982, of considerable ability.

Douglas-Home had learned an important lesson from his service in the Army: that an effective leader needed the close support of those who had experience of commanding in the field (in journalistic terms, those who had made the most of rising through the provincial presses to Fleet Street). The command structure he established around him reflected that belief. When, in the summer of 1982, John Grant announced his intention to retire, the time had come to appoint a new deputy. Fred Emery, the home and foreign executive editor, was obviously qualified in terms of ability but not necessarily of temperament. Despite his regard for Douglas-Home, Emery was not a natural deputy and disliked interference in what he believed to be his own domain. This occasionally manifested itself in the dispatch of somewhat angry and insulting memos to Douglas-Home on the subject.[55] Instead, Douglas-Home decided to look from outside Gray’s Inn Road. He chose Colin Webb. By nature calm and even-tempered in a crisis, Webb was someone the editor could trust implicitly. Given the divided and half-mutinous staff Douglas-Home inherited in March 1982, this was important. Two years Douglas-Home’s junior, the grammar school-educated Webb had started his journalistic career in his native Portsmouth before working his passage to Fleet Street via a short-service commission as a captain in the Royal Army Pay Corps. Douglas-Home had got to know him in 1969 when Webb ran The Times’s home news desk. In 1974 he had left to become editor of the Cambridge Evening News and it was from there that Douglas-Home enticed him back with the deputy editorship. Webb was perfect for the role and proved to have sound instincts matched by a steady hand. He saw his primary role as one of ‘boundary maintenance’, forming a protective ring round the editor.[56] Nonetheless, when Douglas-Home was away from Gray’s Inn Road it was Webb who edited the paper.

Colin Webb’s temperament was very different from that of Charles Wilson. Glimpsing Charles Wilson at work, the casual observer would not have been surprised to discover he was a major force in Fleet Street but it would certainly have come as a revelation to learn he was to be appointed the third most important journalist at The Times. In conversation, he had a deft command of expletives and an imaginative turn of phrase when deploying them. A strong Glaswegian accent gave his abuse an edge of menace that might have been absent if the same invective had been delivered in Liverpudlian, Cockney or Australian tones. Indeed, slight of frame but alert and intense in demeanour, there was much of the bantam-weight boxer about him. During the course of his journalistic career, many a desk, door or even, on one occasion, wall, would feel the full force of his punch as Wilson worked off his anger and frustration. Private Eye dubbed him ‘Charlie Gorbals’. It was a name that stuck, sometimes with affection.

Chance played its part in Charles Wilson’s appointment. Shortly after becoming editor, Douglas-Home had gone up to speak at an annual lunch of Scottish editors. Seated next to him on the top table was Wilson, the start-up editor of a new (and short-lived) Scottish newspaper, the Sunday Standard. The following day, Douglas-Home asked him to become executive editor of The Times. Given that Douglas-Home’s acquaintance with Wilson rested on little more than an agreeable lunch, it was certainly an appointment based primarily upon instinct. As executive editor (soon translated into a second deputy editorship alongside Webb), Wilson was closely involved in selecting what went in the news pages. It involved getting up early in the morning, organizing the news desk, overseeing developments in the afternoon while Douglas-Home was cocooned in his office writing leading articles and spending the evening on the ‘backbench’, overseeing the pages being put together. It was a long day and a tough job. Douglas-Home was right to trust his instinct about Wilson’s suitability for it.

Unlike Douglas-Home, Wilson’s school of hard knocks had not been Eton and the Royal Scots Greys. His father, a supporter of the Independent Labour Party, had been a miner since the age of twelve but an injury in the 1930s forced him to leave the pits and to seek employment in a steelworks. After his first wife died, he married his late brother’s widow. Charles Martin Wilson – or Charlie as he was better known – was born in 1935, two years before Charles – or Charlie – Cospatrick Douglas-Home. His parents had moved from their Glasgow tenement to a two-bedroom home in a council housing estate. Despite its poverty and industrial heart, Glasgow benefited from several good schools and Charlie did well at the local one, Eastbank Academy. All seemed set for a place at Glasgow University. Instead, everything changed one evening when, after a blazing row with his father, his mother walked out taking Charlie (in his last year at school) and his two brothers with her on the night train to London.

Although there was no journalistic background in the Daily Express-reading Wilson family, Charlie had read the papers on his schoolboy paper round, consummating a love affair with the press that never left him. With the prospect of proceeding directly to university removed, he lost no time in getting employment with the press down in London, becoming a copyboy at the People. On reaching his eighteenth birthday, he did two years National Service in the Royal Marines where he won prizes for boxing. As soon as he was out, he got back into the press, switching to regional journalism, starting with the Melton Mowbray Times before moving to the News Chronicle as its West Country staffer. Bastion of liberal journalism, the News Chronicle was in its final year of publication and, when it was forced into a seemingly unlikely merger with the Daily Mail (in effect being subsumed by the right-wing paper), Wilson crossed over with it, becoming the Mail’s East Anglia staffer. From there, his career took off. He moved to London to become a reporter on the Mail’s news desk. By 1961, he was deputy editor during the paper’s conversion from broadsheet to tabloid and thereafter switched to another horse in the Rothermere stable, the London Evening News. The chance to sit in an editor’s chair took him back home to Glasgow when, in 1976, he became editor of the city’s Evening Times. From the Evening Times, Wilson became editor of Outrams’s other leading newspaper, the Glasgow Herald, and designed and launched the group’s venture into weekend journalism, the Sunday Standard. Douglas-Home knew he was bringing back down to London a man who understood how newspapers worked.

Despite their different social backgrounds, Douglas-Home and Wilson got on well. The latter saw past the aristocratic pedigree of the editor, admiring instead ‘an instinctive news man’ who, prior to The Times, had honed his skills in the hard-working, hard-drinking environment of the Daily Express (initially in its Glasgow office before escaping to Fleet Street) in the early 1960s. Douglas-Home’s informality and disinterest in ceremony appealed to Wilson. There was nothing ‘effete’ about the editor, Wilson concluded years later. He was ‘a tough guy’ who was not afraid to be ruthless in cutting away dead wood and taking the responsibility of wielding the axe to do it.[57]

The editorial triumvirate of Douglas-Home, Webb and Wilson saw the paper through a period that started with its very future in question and ended with its circulation doubled and its financial prospects more rosy than they had been for a quarter of a century. There was not a single university degree between these three most senior journalists at Britain’s most venerable newspaper, but there were plenty of formal academic credentials among the other key lieutenants. The well-read Peter Stothard assumed responsibility for Op-Ed and leaders with George Brock as his deputy. Oxbridge degrees abounded among those who appeared on these pages. Arts coverage continued to be under the intelligent gaze of the opera specialist, John Higgins. Peter Strafford succeeded the long-serving Colin Watson as obituaries editor and Leon Pilpel continued to organize the letters page.

There was a question mark over the future of The Times Diary column. Its home had long been across the bottom of the Op-Ed page. In June 1982, the page’s editor, Peter Stothard, wanted to make room for more columnists. Henceforth, ads would no longer be permitted there and Stothard felt the Diary could be safely banished too. Yet no one could agree where, if not on the Op-Ed page, the column should appear. It certainly did not look like a worthy squatter on a serious news page and The Times in 1982 did not think it had a soft news page.[58] However, the plot to shunt the Diary into obscurity was very effectively spiked by its editor, Robin Young, who alerted readers to the threat of it being moved to a less august berth. The appeal reaped the desired effect – three hundred letters demanding that it stay put.[59] So it remained on the Op-Ed page, albeit recast as a vertical single column on the left edge, rather than languidly occupying the bottom third, ‘the basement’, of the page horizontally.

Compiling the Diary was always a delicate task. Adopting a reverential line reduced it to a notice board for anyone with a new book, play or exhibition to promote. Yet, in the early to mid-1980s, The Times retained a sufficiently high impression of itself to eschew following other newspapers’ interest in the doings, preferably salacious, of popular celebrities. This was not just for fear of the laws of libel but on grounds of taste and what was felt appropriate for the supposed paper of record. ‘The Diary has got to keep off smut,’ pronounced Douglas-Home over a piece by Young that referred to the composer Percy Grainger’s inventive sex life.[60] The Diary’s compiler (though in fact there was a small team engaged on it) remained anonymous. Only the initials ‘PHS’ (which stood for Printing House Square – The Times’s traditional address) were proffered at its foot. Under this guise, Angela Gordon, a twenty-six-year-old Scot who had started out on the Edinburgh Evening News before moving to the Telegraph, assumed the editorial mantle in 1984. Nonetheless, some continued to wonder what purpose it served, or, as Lord Dacre put it to Douglas-Home, ‘Don’t you think that the action of your gossip-writer in soliciting, paying for, and publishing juvenile indiscretions, dirt, trivialities, about the great is rather lowering to your great newspaper?’[61]

One aspect of the Diary that was widely admired was its daily pocket cartoon. Mark Boxer (who traded under the name ‘Marc’) had been the master of this art there since 1969. Having been the first editor of the Sunday Times Colour Magazine, Marc’s work drew primarily upon the metropolitan life of which he was himself a rich adornment. His friends included George Melley and Simon Raven and, as an undergraduate in 1953, he had achieved the distinction of being sent down from Cambridge for blasphemy – the first such case since Shelley at Oxford – for a lighthearted but irreverent poem in Granta. Inheriting the tradition of Osbert Lancaster, Marc’s usual format for a thumbnail cartoon involved a sketch of an upper middle-class couple confidently sharing a blasé opinion. He chronicled what became known as the ‘chattering classes’. Sometimes they would be a covert coat- and headscarf- and pearls-wearing couple rasping a reactionary sentiment, although often they were smug Hampstead liberals declaiming the latest fashionable nostrum. Almost invariably, they were apiece with the titbits from the literary and theatrical world that provided the Diary column with so much of its copy. By 1983, Marc had been providing cartoons for the paper for fourteen years and, feeling constrained, moved on, assuming the editorship of Tatler and taking his miniature world with him first to the Guardian and subsequently the Telegraph. He was only fifty-seven when, in 1988, he died of a brain tumour.

Barry Fantoni filled Marc’s gap with cartoons for the Diary column. Fantoni’s angular, harder-edged figures often conversing either side of the headline on a newsstand, represented a wider social and regional milieu than Marc could carry off convincingly although, perhaps in consequence, there was not a comparable level of penetrating satire. Meanwhile, there was also a change with The Times’s principal cartoonist when Ranan Lurie opted to part company on ‘fair and pleasant terms’.[62] His skills as a draughtsman had never been in doubt but he had not lived in Britain for long enough to have a feel for its politics, society or humour and critics felt that this was evident in work that often failed to convey the subtle nuances of the national life. His replacement as chief cartoonist proved to be one of the paper’s enduring assets, Peter Brookes.

On the front page, the thumb cartoonist between 1979 and his untimely death aged sixty-two in 1994 was Mel Calman. His drawing style could not have been more different from that of Peter Brookes. Calman’s figures – composed of a few curved lines and a large nose – lacked individual characteristics and thereby represented ‘everyman’. Given how small the box was in which his idea had to be conveyed, the sense of the little man, anxious and perplexed by the weight of the world around him, worked perfectly. Born in Hackney, the son of Russian-Jewish parents, there was a touch of the underdog in Calman’s own character. Despite his great gifts for friendship and generosity, he was defensive about having become a cartoonist after failing to get into Cambridge or be accepted for a journalism course. Ironically, his art got more closely to the helpless anxieties of the age than even some of the most perceptive reporters despite the fact that, as one posthumous tribute put it, he ‘hated leaving the West End unless it were for New York’. His arrival in The Times office every early evening was one of the great rituals through which those who worked there marked the approach of their own deadlines. Calman’s appearance on the floor was strangely magisterial, the act of removing his overcoat acquiring the symbolic resonance of the boxer slipping out of his dressing gown. He would go through the motions of consulting the backbench about what was in the news and what would make appropriate subject matter before getting down to work. Moments later, the backbench would watch in awe as he re-emerged, overcoat over arm, to bid his toiling colleagues adieu for the evening. Was it really as effortless as he made out? That, at any rate, was the impression he liked to give, at least until on a royal visit to the building, the Duke of Edinburgh took one look at his handiwork and asked, ‘Did you draw these on the bus coming in, then?’[63]

Feature articles, a fast developing area of broadsheet journalism that by The Times of the year 2000 merited a whole daily section, received only a single page a day in the paper of the 1980s under the title ‘Spectrum’. However (except on Thursdays when book reviews occupied the available space) there was also an additional page devoted to features designed to be of particular interest to women. These were unimaginatively entitled the Monday, Wednesday and Friday pages, while on Tuesdays Suzy Menkes’s fashion page appeared. Besides the lead story, there was a diary column, graced by the likes of Joanna Lumley, Penny Perrick and Alan Franks and recipes on Wednesdays and Saturdays by The Times cook, Shona Crawford Poole, as well as regular medical briefings.

In some respects, The Times’s greatest shortcoming was not – as was regularly claimed – its generally male-orientated outlook (beyond the designated page for women) but its failure to expand a section that particularly appealed to more masculine pastimes. The paper was at its weakest in its sporting coverage. The Times had no shortage of quality sports’ journalists but the failure to give them the room they needed ensured that in the twenty years before Murdoch bought the paper it competed seriously against its rivals only in its coverage of racing and cricket with rugby union and golf as runners-up.

Norman Fox, who had been reporting football for The Times since the propitious year of 1966, became sports editor in 1982. He was subsequently assisted by a deputy, Richard Williams, who succeeded in balancing his tasks on the sports desk with maintaining an interest in the arts features. Indeed, Douglas-Home – whose principal sporting interests were sailing and riding – considered Williams and Peter Stothard the two most promising journalists on the paper.[64] There were, however, other emerging talents. Upon assuming command, Fox began making a number of first-class appointments that would be critical to the paper’s back pages in the years ahead. David Hands became the rugby correspondent in 1983, a post for which he was so suited that he was still in it twenty years later. Fox also appointed David Miller as the paper’s first all purpose chief sport’s writer. This was an important moment for The Times, heralding a new era in which sports journalism evolved beyond the core skills of filing match reports and related news events. Henceforth, it would, like philosophy or politics, deserve magisterial interpreters. In December 1982, another Fox appointment, Simon Barnes, began working for the paper and would soon demonstrate that he was a master of this art.

A Bristol University graduate whose father had been the producer of Blue Peter and head of children’s programmes at the BBC, there was something agreeably accidental about Barnes’s path into the highest echelons of sports journalism. He had begun as a news reporter on local newspapers and so hated the bullying attitude of his editor that he had determined to apply for the next vacancy that presented itself. This transpired to be on the sports desk. Nonetheless, he was still in his thirties and living in a London bedsit when he finally got his foot inside The Times’s door. Norman Fox recognized his talents and suggested he write a weekly column on obscure sports. Thus, Barnes turned his attention to such exhibitions of sporting prowess as bicycle polo and boules. It was soon evident that sport, especially at the epic scale, with its polarity of emotions, provided ideal material for his craft as a writer. While politicians and businessmen sought to dissemble and cover themselves up from the critical glare, Barnes liked the way in which sporting figures stood ’emotionally stark naked’.[65] The glory and cruelty were inescapable parts of the spectacle. Barnes’s ability to file copy at short notice was widely admired but he had a lyrical and reflective quality that marked him out from the professional space fillers. He edited an anthology entitled A La Recherche du Cricket Perdu and was an avid birdwatcher (indeed, a love of Proust and ornithology was something he shared with the paper’s nature notes writer, Derwent May). As a spectator of birds as well as of sporting prowess, Barnes wrote books on ornithology that were as acclaimed as his award-winning writing on sport. Crouching in the bushes was not his only means of observing nature. He was drawn to country life and long hours were to be enjoyed surveying the countryside from the saddle of one of his horses.

Indeed, judged by space made available in The Times, racing was, by a considerable margin, the most important sport in Britain. The paper was fortunate to have Michael Phillips as its racing correspondent from 1967 and he continued to write on the sport of kings as ‘Mandarin’ from March 1984 until his retirement in January 1993. Filing copy most days of the week, he was one of The Times’s most prolific journalists.

Filing beside Phillips, first as northern correspondent and thereafter as racing correspondent until his (semi) retirement in 1991 was Michael Seely. Seely was the sort of journalist whose life and work became the stuff of Fleet Street legend. He was the son of an eccentric Nottinghamshire squire who had ridden in the Grand National and enjoyed a ménage à trois with his wife and a mistress (who was thirty-five years his junior) at Ramsdale Hall in Nottinghamshire. Michael Seely’s early career had been marked by a distinct lack of promise. He had gone from Eton into the Grenadier Guards in 1944 and spent much of the succeeding years woozy through drink. His father disinherited him in 1952 for marrying a ‘hostess’ he had met in the West End’s notorious Bag of Nails nightclub. A second marriage proved more successful and Seely cut back on his alcoholic consumption. Yet, he might have continued as a clerk at the Raleigh bicycle factory had he not got a lucky break to work on the official weekly form book, Raceform. There, his talent was spotted and in his fiftieth year he got his first newspaper posting when he joined The Times in 1975. The role of racing correspondent, with its travelling between racecourses and almost daily deadlines, was not naturally suited to a man of Michael Seely’s disorganization and general inability to master even the simplest technology – he continued to file in an almost illegible longhand until the 1990s – but, no matter how fine he cut the deadline, the copy was invariably of the highest standard. Having shared with Michael Phillips the Lord Derby Racing Journalist of the Year Award in 1980 he won it outright in 1989.

Around the racecourses, Seely cut an eccentric but much-loved figure. He continued to enjoy a reputation as a bon viveur and roué while almost constantly mislaying his false teeth. On one occasion he watched helplessly while his dentures were driven over in the Newmarket car park. Upon disinterring the remains, he nonchalantly gave them a light polish and placed them back in his mouth, subsequently alleging that they were now a far better fit. Besides his prose and racing knowledge, his journalistic talent was honed by his charm and friendliness, attributes that ensured he knew what was going on. To mark his retirement in 1991, Simon Jenkins (by then editor of The Times) hosted a party for him in the Jockey Rooms at Newmarket to which most of the leading figures in the sport turned up. Charlie Wilson took Jenkins on a tour of the Jockey Rooms’ collection of equestrian art, stopping by one painting to helpfully point out which end was the head and which the tail. Seely’s successor was Richard Evans. Evans had been on the racing desk for a year, having previously spent three years as media editor and, before that, eight years on the parliamentary and political staff.

Besides golf, which was reported on by John Hennessy, cricket was the other sport in which the paper had a rightly acclaimed reputation. Marcus Williams covered the county game between 1981 and 1995. The Test matches were the preserve of John Woodcock, cricket correspondent from 1954 to 1987 (although he was still writing periodically for the paper into the twenty-first century) who combined the post after 1980 with the editorship of Wisden. During this period, one series outshone all others for its mixture of drama and unpredictability: the 1981 Ashes. Ian Botham stepped down after claiming the England captaincy’s worst ever record. No sooner had he done so than he transformed himself into a hero of mythic status. England, having not won any of their past twelve Tests, were following on and struggling at 135 for 7 when he stepped out to bat in the Third Test at Headingley. The canny bookmakers Ladbrokes were offering odds of 500–1 on an England victory. Undaunted, Botham batted England back into the game, although when he finally ran out of support at the opposite crease, the 130-run target set Australia was easily obtainable. When they responded, reaching fifty-five for one, the tourists appeared to be sailing to victory. Then Bob Willis struck with the ball, taking eight wickets for forty-three runs, leaving the stunned Australians eighteen runs short of taking a commanding lead in the series. It was only the second time in Test history that a side asked to follow on had proceeded to win the match (it had last happened in 1894). Yet, the epic was not over, for Botham emerged as Man of the Match in the following Test at Edgbaston when he took Australia’s last five wickets for one run. It was a moment of sporting glory. Having scarcely recovered from recording the miracle of Headingley, John Woodcock was again given the honour of starting his report of this latest triumph on the front page under a picture of Botham and his successor as captain, Mike Brearley, with arms raised in ecstasy, an image trapped for eternity. ‘At times,’ Woodcock informed, ‘the crowd of 15,000 cheered the home side on as though it was a horse race.’ The rarity of such placement in The Times’s order of priorities was demonstrated when England retained the Ashes two weeks later at Old Trafford. The front page ran with a picture of Senator Edward Kennedy swinging a softball bat during a festival for the disabled in Boston.[66]

The year 1981 was an exceptionally memorable one for sport in Britain. Besides Botham and Willis’s heroics in the Ashes, in athletics Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett fought it out for the 1500 metres world record and John McEnroe earned his ‘superbrat’ soubriquet at Wimbledon. In The Times, the Wimbledon fortnight was the busy two-week period each year in which Rex Bellamy, the esteemed tennis correspondent between 1967 and 1992, more than proved his worth and left himself with plenty of time to go fellwalking during the remaining fifty weeks of the year. Nonetheless, despite Bellamy’s considerable experience, the paper usually thought the championships merited only half a page’s coverage a day. It took John McEnroe’s famous racket-breaking tantrum during his first-round victory over Tom Gullikson to ensure another rare sporting picture foray onto the front page. The accompanying text alerted readers that McEnroe had ‘called the referee a four-letter name’. Inquisitive readers turning to the skimpy report of the match on page ten were doubtless relieved to discover ‘it was not a very serious one’. This was the match – although the Times report did not have room to record it – in which McEnroe had famously told the umpire, Edward James, ‘You guys are the absolute pits of the world.’ Unfortunately, James had misheard the taunt and, believing he had been accused of being ‘the piss of the world’, duly penalized McEnroe for obscenity.[67]

The Times’s interest in on-court antics at the All England Club appeared positively indulgent compared with its breathtakingly inadequate coverage of the 1982 Football World Cup in Spain. Not even the fact that England and the holders, Argentina, were both competing while the Falklands War was still being waged between them was sufficient to give it a higher priority. Each day, the championships struggled to receive much more than half a page. England had not been in the World Cup since it had been hosted in Mexico, twelve years earlier. Nonetheless, their fixtures received only one report each – from the necessarily hard-working and self-dependent Stuart Jones, The Times’s football correspondent. There was no room for analysis for a team that commenced the competition with a 3–1 victory over France. Readers had to take it on trust that the performance had been ‘inspired’.[68] Yet, on the same day, racing coverage received a full page – Royal Ascot being regarded as a bigger sporting event than the World Cup. This was not the behaviour of a newspaper that was serious about broadening its appeal. When, eventually, England was knocked out, The Times did condescend to mention the fact, in passing, on the front page, but it was not deemed worthy of a photograph. The paper led that day instead with a picture of Sir Peter Parker standing talking to a fellow British Rail board member in a deserted strikebound foyer of Euston Station. Italy’s defeat of West Germany in the World Cup final received an even smaller front-page reference, although it did benefit from an accompanying photograph a little larger than a postage stamp.[69]

In the 1930s, the football game that The Times – and its readers – was primarily interested in was played with the oval-shaped ball. Nonetheless, given the constraints of the age, it did provide passable association football coverage, especially for those still following the amateur side of the game, where teams, many prefixed by the world ‘old’, vied for manly satisfaction in The Isthmian League, The Spartan League and The Arthur Dunn Cup. By the 1980s, though, the paper’s coverage of league football had moved on sufficiently to have lost contact with its amateur proponents but had not greatly expanded its professional reportage. Stuart Jones was the only staff employee covering the game although he was assisted in reporting the weekend fixtures by various freelancers and by the subeditors who – with no paper to work on for Sunday – spent their Saturdays reporting from the various football grounds. Generally, Monday’s Times would devote two-thirds of a page to the weekend’s action. Necessarily, clubs outside the First Division (which was then the top division) struggled to make an impact beyond the football results. Readers living in the North were lucky if they even received this courtesy. Unlike its principal rivals, The Times did not print in Manchester as well as London. This frequently ensured patchy sports coverage particularly of football results appearing in the northern editions. The chances of anyone in Scotland reading a report on Celtic or Rangers, Hibs or Hearts, was even more remote. It may well have been one of the reasons few people north of the border bought The Times.

As the decade wore on, so the paper made gradual attempts to enhance its football coverage. Regrettably, the sport tended to make its greatest impact in the paper for the worst of reasons. 1985 proved to be a terrible year for English football. On 11 May, fifty-six spectators were killed in a fire at Bradford City. A fortnight later, seventy England fans were arrested after going on the rampage in Helsinki and on 29 May, a riot begun by Liverpool fans at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels prior to the European Cup final caused the death of thirty-eight Juventus fans and injured one hundred and fifty more. Two days later, the Football Association prohibited English clubs from competing in Europe, a ban that FIFA extended to cover the rest of the world. The country that had invented the sport was now in quarantine, its competitors rightly keen to be inoculated against the ‘British disease’ of hooliganism.

V

Edition number 62,025 of The Times appeared on 2 January 1985, two hundred years and one day after the paper’s first edition. For those who had worked on the paper – to say nothing of loyal readers who had stuck with it over many years through thick and thin – it was a justifiable cause for celebration. With circulation at an all-time record, a much-admired editor in the chair and some of the most famous names in journalism on the payroll, it was hard to conceive that only five years earlier the paper had been widely feared to have only ten weeks left to live.

There was, perhaps, some irony that it had been saved by Rupert Murdoch, a proprietor accused of having an unsentimental approach to the survival of British institutions. Yet, he proved as animated by the bicentenary celebrations for Britain’s oldest and most famous national newspaper as everyone else. Indeed, he and his wife, Anna, even hosted a dinner for the descendants of John Walter, the man who invented the paper and whose family had owned it outright until 1908. With the miners’ strike continuing to dominate the front page, it was only a small left-hand column that alerted readers to the fact that this was the paper’s bicentennial issue. Inside, however, the commemoration began with the enclosure of a free facsimile of the first edition of 1 January 1785: a four-page newspaper given over largely to small ads and self-promotion in which only four of the sixteen columns of text contained actual news. There was certainly nothing particularly portentous about that first edition, a fact that might explain why only one copy had survived the intervening two hundred years to tell the tale. Before entering the care of the British Library, it had been kept by the father of the late eighteenth-century novelist Fanny Burney.

The Times certainly made more of its bicentenary than it had in 1885 when it celebrated one hundred years with nothing more than a single self-effacing paragraph. In 1985, a colour commemorative magazine and wall-chart poster were published together with two books: a large coffee-table tome focusing on the highs (and a few lows) in the paper’s history entitled We Thundered Out by Philip Howard and Double Century: 200 Years of Cricket in The Times edited by Marcus Williams. The latter was formally launched at the bicentennial cricket match at the historic Hambledon ground in Hampshire in June where a Times XI declared on 128 for 3 (helped by an undefeated fifty from guest batsman, Mike Brearley). Their opponents from the publishers Collins (assisted by Bob Willis) had made sixty-six for two when rain stopped play. John Arlott had presided over lunch and in the evening 450 Times staff were entertained at a dinner in the Victoria & Albert Museum as Douglas-Home’s guests.

The involvement of other bodies in the celebration was the real testament to the paper’s enduring place in national life, not least because it showed it was still a marketable asset. The Post Office brought out a celebratory first-day cover of stamps. Wedgwood designed a plate reproducing Benjamin Haydon’s painting Waiting for The Times. At the Chelsea Flower Show, Anna Murdoch officially named The Times rose (a hardy perennial floribunda with deep crimson-scarlet blooms that had been selected by the paper’s gardening correspondent, Ashley Stephenson). It was subsequently made available in a reader offer. Likewise, Bollinger brought out a Times cuvée. Douglas-Home named a British Rail locomotive (class 86) The Times amid great fanfare (the train later crashed, to more muted reporting). On 31 January, the bicentennial concert was performed at the Festival Hall, Sir George Solti conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a programme of Shostakovich and Bruckner. The British Library’s ‘Signs of The Times 1785–1985’ exhibition ran from March to June. This was a level of public recognition accorded few other national institutions and no other newspaper.

There were two television documentaries to mark the bicentenary. Hugo Young presented the BBC’s The Times at 200, the Corporation reversing its earlier disinterest in such a programme when it learned Thames TV had been given six months’ access to film in Gray’s Inn Road for a commemorative documentary they were making. The latter, narrated by Anthony Quayle with the title The Greatest Newspaper in the World! (with a tabloid exclamation rather than a broadsheet question mark), was broadcast on 2 January 1985, three days after Hugo Young’s more agnostic approach to the birthday institution.

The Thames documentary took as its starting point the view of Establishment critics of their supposed house journal: Edward Heath claimed, ‘It doesn’t thunder any more, occasionally screams. Today’s Times has very little influence’; Dr Anthony Kenny, the Master of Balliol, noted that it was no longer a journal of record; Lord Mancroft drew attention to the poor picture reproduction and misprints; the Bishop of Peterborough thought it was becoming trivial, like the antics of a trendy vicar. Some of the paper’s journalists also felt free to criticize. Michael Binyon expressed regret that the paper was lacking its former intellectual drive (an observation that Wilson subsequently assured him was a sackable offence) while the salesroom correspondent, Geraldine Norman, bemoaned the fact that where once she could write about what she thought was important now she was expected to reflect what readers were presumed to find interesting. The view that the paper’s golden age was as the house organ of a tiny elite was firmly slapped down by someone who came from that very class. Douglas-Home told the cameras ‘we don’t want to confine the paper to the mandarin class’. This sentiment was more forcefully expressed by Murdoch, who, in words that closed the programme, condemned ‘people who are elitist at heart’, adding ‘and if it’s going down-market for them then good, because one of the things that’s wrong with this country is its all pervasive elitism’.[70]

Such opinions were not given rein by Murdoch or Douglas-Home when, on the morning of 28 February, they stood at the Gray’s Inn Road entrance to greet the Queen and Prince Philip. The visit of the Head of State and her consort was no mere courtesy call. The royal party sat in on the morning editorial conference, Prince Philip proving keen to join the discussion on what the day’s top stories were. They then spent a couple of hours being shown round the various departments and returned in the evening to watch the paper being put to bed. In the photocomposition area, Prince Philip enquired how a gap on the sports page was going to be filled. The compositor replied, ‘If nothing comes through we’ll put in a panel saying: “Read the Telegraph. It’s best for sport.”’ Moving on to the publishing hall, the Queen asked one not especially hard-pressed operator what he was doing. He assured her that he was counting the pages in the paper. Philip interjected, ‘Haven’t you done the crossword yet?’[71]

The visit was marred only by Paul Routledge who repeated a conversation he had with the Queen about the miners. Introduced to the labour editor, the Queen had expressed the view that the miners’ strike was all down to one man. Routledge begged to differ, suggesting that it was also about jobs and livelihoods. In the course of a BBC Radio 4 interview about the royal visit, he referred to the incident and stated, ‘I think she felt that the dispute was essentially promoted by Mr Scargill.’ Repeating the conversation was not only a breach of protocol, it gave the impression the Queen had adopted a political position. Seething with anger, Douglas-Home rushed to limit the damage, disclaiming the interpretation of the Queen’s words which, he said, Routledge had only ‘half heard’. Few journalists at Gray’s Inn Road were less susceptible to bullying than Paul Routledge and it was a sign of how much pressure was placed upon him that he was forced to agree to a statement in which he said, ‘The Queen said the strike was very sad. We had a discussion about the focus now being on one man but she never said the strike was promoted by Mr Scargill.’ For his pains, Douglas-Home was deluged with ‘disgusted’ readers demanding that Routledge be sacked (some got carried away and demanded his head). The editor did not wish to lose one of his star reporters and opted instead to issue him with a rebuke while assuring those who wrote in that Routledge was ‘fully aware of the shame he has brought on the paper’.[72] Although blown up out of proportion – not least by those who wanted to see some rain fall on The Times’s parade day, ‘Times editor’s apology to the Queen’ was the front-page headline on the Daily Mail – it was an unfortunate incident in an otherwise good-natured and highly successful visit.

The Queen and Prince Philip were far from being the only guests who came to celebrate the bicentenary. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret also made royal progressions through Gray’s Inn Road during the course of the year. The highlight was the bicentennial gala hosted by Rupert and Anna Murdoch at Hampton Court Palace on 11 July. Any suggestion that The Times was no longer special could be dispelled by a guest list that included the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Prime Minister, the leaders of the SDP and Liberal parties (Neil Kinnock had to bow out at the last minute), three former Prime Ministers (Home, Wilson and Callaghan), most of the world’s ambassadors to the United Kingdom and six hundred other guests. Indeed, everyone appeared to be there apart from the actual journalists, some of whom took their exclusion as a snub and organized a rival event in a pub called the Hampton Court near Elephant and Castle. The egalitarian spirit of this alternative attraction was somewhat undermined when non-journalist members of staff like the secretaries and clerical employees were declined entry on the grounds they were not proper hacks. This was an example, if one was needed, that in Fleet Street hierarchy was alive and well in some of the most unlikely places. For those who made it to the real Hampton Court, the experience was one to be savoured. Even those used to State occasions were taken aback by the grandeur of the display. Reflecting on the event eighteen years later, Sir Edward Pickering, the executive vice-chairman of Times Newspapers, described it as one of the greatest evenings of his life.[73] The guests perambulated through the main rooms of the palace, navigating a route around string quartets, harp trios and piano duos. The Band of the Scots Guards, with pipes and drums, marched through the courtyards and there was a profusion of period recreations from the London of 1785, including a hurdy-gurdy player, a troupe of acrobats and other entertainments typical of the Vauxhall and Ranleigh pleasure gardens in vogue when John Walter’s money-spinning venture first went to press. Dinner was held in the Great Hall. Murdoch proposed a toast to the Queen; Prince Charles proposed a toast to The Times. After dinner, the guests made their way down to the riverbank to watch the fireworks. It was, by common consent, a magical evening. Most importantly of all, The Times had made it to its bicentenary, an achievement that had looked in great doubt only four years earlier.

VI

For one guest in a wheelchair the gala evening in Hampton Court was particularly poignant. Diagnosed with myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow, and with his own time running out, Douglas-Home had at least lived long enough to see the newspaper he edited through to its bicentenary. For the past two years, he had been not only acclimatizing himself psychologically to approaching death but also dealing with acute pain. His fortitude inspired his colleagues. By the end of 1982 he had already succumbed to crutches, his degenerative illness compounded when, returning from Scotland in the New Year, he was hit by a swinging car door and knocked over, badly injuring his hip. On arrival back in London, he had to be anaesthetized by an ambulance crew to get him out of his driving seat.

For six weeks in January and February 1983, Douglas-Home edited The Times from his bed in the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. Propped up by pillows, he continued to write leading articles. Murdoch visited him there twice, expressing his pleasure at the way the paper’s fortunes were being turned around and repledging his intention to maintain investment. From all but his closest colleagues, Douglas-Home concealed the truth that he was dying. He thought Murdoch did not know and was certainly keen that it should stay that way. In fact, the proprietor knew from early on, opting to pretend otherwise. It suited both editor and proprietor that it should be this way. Douglas-Home certainly need not have feared being seen as a disposable liability. On the contrary, Murdoch made clear to senior colleagues that he was totally supportive and that everything was to be done to assist him in his last battle. Quietly, Murdoch took steps to ensure that, when the time came, the pension provision was adequate for the family Douglas-Home would be leaving behind.

Even some of the most eagle-eyed reporters were slow to realize that the editor’s health and increasingly regular hospitalization were indications that he was suffering from a degenerative illness. Initially, many merely assumed that he had fallen off a horse again. But by late 1984, and without there needing to be any formal announcement, staff gradually became aware that he was involved in a personal battle. As his illness worsened, so he became less mobile. First he hobbled back to Gray’s Inn Road on one stick. Then two sticks became necessary. There were moments when the pain was so excruciating that he had to take some conferences while lying flat on his back on his office floor. But he carried on. Then he was confined to a wheelchair. Next, a swelling started to appear across his forehead. This increasing immobility meant that he could not get around all the departments as much as he would have wanted and became increasingly confined to his office, from where he continued to write leaders. His deputies, Colin Webb and Charles Wilson, did much of the floor prowling on his behalf.

For Douglas-Home, part of the process of coming to terms with his physical degeneration was, if anything, to sharpen his appreciation of life. His wife observed in him ‘an even greater ability than before to perceive and understand situations which other more restless and preoccupied people often preferred not to see’.[74] Reflecting on the lessons of Christ’s birth for what would prove to be his last Christmas Eve leading article, the editor wrote:

At the darkest moment there is the promise of daylight … For the noon day sun the darkness which lies ahead is no external enemy but its own internal guarantee of another noon to come … The beauty and the joy of a birth and the joy of life itself should dispel the unusually intense fear of death which seems nowadays to have whole societies in its grip. A wasted life is a living death long before the clock actually strikes the hour. Fear of death is identical with not wanting to live. Both attitudes negate the possibility of life’s completeness. They both negate the affirmation of life as an element in the natural order of things.[75]

Douglas-Home’s spells in hospital grew more frequent but still he refused to give up. Webb took the morning conference. A telephone was installed for him and this made editing the paper from a hospital bed a little easier. When it was time for the leader writers to gather, Douglas-Home, laid up again in the Royal Free Hospital, ‘joined’ the discussion with the help of a squawk box attached to his bedside table. The clarity of the speaker box was so good that he claimed to be able to hear Ivan Barnes’s eyebrows rasing. He was spending long periods having radium treatment and sometimes his commentary would have to be interrupted while doctors and nurses attended to him. His secretary, Liz Seeber, performed sterling work running his office and easing his burdens. Towards the end, he tended not to see most of the page proofs any more but a messenger was dispatched from Gray’s Inn Road with the leader and feature pages for his perusal and approval. Among his private bedside visitors was the Prince of Wales. Although Douglas-Home was actually his wife’s relation, Prince Charles had long been a close friend. Laurens van der Post had brought the two men together in a shared interest in spiritual questions. The Prince took as much time out as his duties permitted to visit and wrote encouraging letters both to Charlie and to Jessica Douglas-Home. His sentiments were heartfelt and touching.[76] Those closest to the editor professionally – his secretaries, his deputies Webb and Wilson – also did their best. It was important that he went down editing to the last, and every effort was made to ensure he did so. ‘He used The Times as his therapy, his inspiration, his reason for living,’ concluded Wilson. Although not given to sentimental hyperbole, Wilson never ceased to regard Douglas-Home as a ‘great guy, a wonderful man. He was the bravest man I ever met.’[77]

Charles Douglas-Home died in the Royal Free Hospital on 29 October 1985. He was forty-eight. At Gray’s Inn Road, The Times staff rose as one for a minute’s silence for him at 4 p.m. – the moment he would normally have opened the afternoon editorial conference. Tributes poured in from peers and princes. ‘His very name spells courage,’ said Margaret Thatcher, who also wrote a moving letter to Jessica. Neil Kinnock also sent a kind and touching note. Murdoch offered his own salute: ‘Charles walked the corridors of power in continual pain, but with dignity and incredible courage.’ From New York, Anna Murdoch even offered to fly over to stay with Jessica and her young family if she thought it would help. A lengthy telegram was received – unsolicited – from President Reagan: ‘the United Kingdom, the English speaking world, indeed, all friends of freedom, have suffered a great loss,’ announced the President as part of a generous appraisal of his contribution that was followed up with a personal letter to Jessica.[78] In the days and weeks ahead, she was deluged with letters from those who had worked with him and admired the man or, if they were strangers, merely wanted to salute his contribution to public life.

In the Spectator, Paul Johnson suggested that among the ‘foetid odours’ of Fleet Street, ‘his personal example’ had shown that journalism ‘can still be an honourable trade’. The magazine devoted part of its leading article to Douglas-Home, calling forth his ‘zest for action and his gift for cheering people up’ and painting a wider picture:

The Times he dreamed of and, in a miraculously short time, created, was not the old, shuffling Times of the 1930s and 1940s. It was brisk, aggressive, occasionally vulgar (or jolly, to put it another way), sometimes wrong, but never, if he could help it, bland. And people wanted to read it.[79]

More than a thousand mourners attended Douglas-Home’s memorial service in St Paul’s Cathedral, among them the Prince and Princess of Wales and other members of the royal family, the Prime Minister and senior members of the Cabinet, four earls, eighteen barons and thirty knights. Having helped in the selection of the order of service, Prince Charles read the first lesson. The correspondent for the UK Press Gazette described it as ‘the most remarkable tribute to a journalist I have ever attended’.[80]

Douglas-Home had inherited a newspaper in crisis and left it reinvigorated and self-confident. In the space of three and a half years he had earned the right to be considered one of its great editors. Commercially and professionally, he had presided over a period in which The Times had achieved the most difficult of tricks: rapidly expanding its circulation without greatly demeaning its quality. The growth would not have been possible without the accompanying investment that Murdoch was prepared to put at the editor’s disposal, sums which he had balked at giving Harold Evans. Unlike Evans, Douglas-Home had gained and maintained the proprietor’s confidence. This had been achieved through strength and independence of mind and certainly not by sycophancy or subservience. As Murdoch later assessed the relationship, ‘he was always terribly straight with me and stood up for the paper if I criticized it’. Those criticisms did not touch upon the political slant of the paper (there was little to trouble the proprietor there) but rather in its handling of news. Murdoch wanted The Times to ‘go for the jugular’ of the Daily Telegraph in the sharpness and selection of its news coverage. Instead, he had to accept that the editor simply ‘didn’t buy into that’.[81] There certainly was much the paper could learn from its younger, more popular rival, especially when it came to sporting coverage and news stories with a human angle, but essentially Douglas-Home was right to play to The Times’s strengths. It was in this respect that his success could not be attributed to Murdoch’s money alone but to the editorial judgments he made alongside Webb and Wilson. As has been noted, the great surge in circulation was well underway before the Portfolio promotion commenced. Only in one area did the need to make budget cuts seriously reduce the quality of the paper and this was in the business pages where the attempt to offer serious competition to the FT was abandoned. It would take more than a decade before the damage to this important part of the paper was properly repaired. In other respects, the legacy was a positive one. Aside from his professional judgment, it was in his own conduct that Douglas-Home set the highest standard. ‘Even when he was ill, his authority inside the office was unquestioned’ was the verdict of Sir Edward Pickering, a man who, with the better part of forty years experience in Fleet Street’s senior ranks, had seen his fair share of careers wax and wane. He considered Douglas-Home’s swansong ‘an act of devotion and courage which I don’t think I have ever seen rivalled in any newspaper office’.[82]

Douglas-Home’s personal courage inspired those who knew him. His professional judgment nourished The Times’s commercial recovery. His editorship, though, had a wider significance in its contribution to the intellectual fortification it provided for the centre-right during a tense period in the Cold War. At the time, this was controversial. Those who took the view that ‘serious journalism’ was ‘journalism which causes serious trouble for people who have real power’ had not welcomed Douglas-Home’s appointment as editor. The New Statesman, edited by Bruce Page, had asserted that Douglas-Home’s ‘record in serious journalism is wholly negligible’ and that ‘while Rupert Murdoch’s nominee holds the chair at The Times, the rich and powerful will never need to toss upon the pillow’.[83] Given that as a reporter in 1968 it had been Douglas-Home who had revealed the concealed presence of 25,000 Soviet troops on the Slovak-Polish border waiting to crush the Prague Spring and been arrested trying to get a closer look, the New Statesman clearly set a high bar on what constituted serious journalism. Perhaps this was because exposing and undermining the Conservative and Republican administrations in Westminster and Washington was the great prize for investigative journalists in the 1980s. In his newspaper, Douglas-Home never ceased to provide a platform for Thatcher and Reagan’s battery of critics – as any glance at the contributors to the Op-Ed comment page would attest – but his own contribution, expressed through the leading articles he penned himself, was to oppose the widely expressed belief that there was a moral equivalence between liberal-capitalism and Marxist-Leninism and between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. He was an ex-soldier and ex-defence correspondent and this doubtless sharpened his attitude towards the Cold War division. Yet, what gave his contribution weight was his ability as a committed Christian to engage in intelligent argument with those, especially in the churches and peace movements, who demanded rapprochement with Moscow.

For Douglas-Home, this was the greatest issue of the time and he would not have the leading column of The Times failing to take a lead on it. In the 1940s, the paper, under the influence of its assistant editor E. H. Carr, had been indulgent towards Communism. It had accepted the Soviet Union’s right to determine the politics of Eastern Europe’s nations and even announced that Communism and Western democracy had much to learn from each other.[84] Some regarded this as the sort of well-balanced argument they expected from The Times leader column. To Douglas-Home it was both misguided and immoral. He thundered against the attitude of a draft statement put before the British Council of Churches in 1985 that maintained ‘both Marxism and Western liberalism in their many forms enshrine positive values’ and that there was some sort of equivalence between the Soviet Union’s incarceration of ten thousand political prisoners and the ‘well over 10,000 Americans killed every year by hand guns which Americans have the “right” to carry’.[85]

The crushing of dissenting voices was, to Douglas-Home, the most insidious aspect of Communist totalitarian rule and he could not understand the blasé attitude towards it from so much of the British intelligentsia. During his editorship, The Times devoted much space to the fate of Russian and Eastern European prisoners of conscience and Jessica, his widow, continued to be active in promoting the work of democratic dissident groups in Eastern Europe after her husband’s death. As far as the outside world was concerned, Douglas-Home’s principal contribution was that he gave anti-Communism a stronger voice in one of the world’s most influential newspapers. In Britain, and indeed even within Gray’s Inn Road, many felt this process undermined The Times’s reputation as a paper of judicious and measured observation and that Douglas-Home had reduced it to the status of a partisan periodical from which it never fully recovered. The leader writer Richard Davy later wrote that the extent of Douglas-Home’s hostility to compromising with the Soviets ‘destroyed the intellectual integrity of the paper’.[86] Certainly, there are dangers in a newspaper adopting a strong position and both Davy and Edward Mortimer had often good grounds for feeling that they were dissenting voices who were being crushed by an editor who had given up on nuanced argument. If Douglas-Home had continued to take a dogmatic line later in the decade, when even Reagan grasped the opportunities for dialogue with Gorbachev, The Times would certainly have been culpable of terrible judgment. It can only be speculated how, or whether, Douglas-Home would have adapted to changed circumstances. Instead, he was responding to a Soviet Union that under Brezhnev and Andropov presented a far less amenable face. He did not live to see the collapse of Communism. Unquestionably, some early signs for diplomatic overtures were missed because of his attitude, but, whatever the aspirations of some of its more disaffected journalists, The Times was not the house journal of the Foreign Office. The paper had been haunted by its support for appeasing Hitler in the 1930s and Stalin in the 1940s. Douglas-Home laid those ghosts to rest.

VII

From within Gray’s Inn Road, the two deputy editors, Colin Webb and Charles Wilson, were the obvious contenders to fill the vacant chair. Colleagues considered Webb to possess a safe pair of hands but recognized that Wilson was the more dynamic candidate. Both had proved themselves more than capable, but Wilson had an advantage. At the end of 1983, Murdoch had bought the Chicago Sun-Times for $90 million, to the horror of the paper’s staff who feared he wanted to turn it into a sensationalist tabloid. When, in the new year, he found himself needing a replacement editor at short notice he had asked Wilson if he would do him ‘a favour’ by standing in as the Sun-Times’s editor until a suitable American could be found to take over. Wilson replied ‘sure’ and asked when he would be expected to go to the Windy City. ‘My plane is on the tarmac,’ replied Murdoch, ‘and I’m going back tonight.’ Mentioning that his pregnant wife was at home with a broken collarbone, Wilson managed to negotiate a day’s leeway. When the new editor arrived for his first day at the Sun-Times, Murdoch was on hand to greet him, introduce him to the managing editor and point him in the direction of the executive washroom. This done, Murdoch announced he was off and if Wilson needed anything he should call him in New York. Within minutes of the proprietor’s hasty departure, Wilson discovered he had been lowered into ‘a bloody cauldron of hate’.[87] Sun-Times journalists had been made aware of Harold Evans’s claims in Good Times, Bad Times and were not encouraged by the verdict of Patrick Brogan, a former pre-Murdoch Times journalist of note who had never met him but felt able to pronounce that ‘Wilson is very tough, unpleasant, rude to his subordinates. He puts the fear of God in them.’[88] When, at Wilson’s first conference, one staff member asked whether the paper would continue to have a Washington bureau, it was clear how little trust existed.

Three months later, when it was time for Wilson to return to London, Sun-Times staff circulated a petition asking him to stay. The speed with which he had won over the journalists by his hard work and focus on sharper news presentation impressed Murdoch. And Murdoch soon had a new mission for Wilson in London. Fed up with Fleet Street’s industrial relations and technological limitations, he had decided to sack all his print union workers and move his four British newspapers to Wapping in London’s East End. It was an immensely risky operation that – if it failed – stood to bankrupt Murdoch. It needed a hard-working, determined and ruthless general who would see it through and carry the troops of The Times with him. On 5 November 1985, the independent national directors duly approved Murdoch’s recommendation that Charles Wilson should succeed Charles Douglas-Home as the thirteenth editor of The Times. ‘Ah yes,’ Bernard Levin had prophesied when Wilson first arrived, ‘the man who knows how to put the razor blade in the snowball.’[89]

CHAPTER FIVE

FORTRESS WAPPING

The Plan to Outwit the Print Unions

I

In the ten years to January 1986, strikes and stoppages plagued Murdoch’s News International. During the period, industrial action prevented 296 million copies of the Sun and 38 million copies of the News of the World from rolling off the presses. One hundred and four million copies of the Sunday Times had been lost over the past decade. The Times had lost 96.5 million copies.

Financially, losing a day’s distribution represented an immediate shortfall of £71,000 to The Times, £362,000 to the Sunday Times, £470,000 to the Sun and £777,000 to the News of the World.[1] But this was only a fragment of the total cost. Trade union activists were able to damage News International without actually taking a full day out on strike. Go-slows, refusal to work specific shifts and deliberate tampering with the printing presses ensured that, although the paper was eventually printed, it was released too late to catch the correct trains and ended up being dumped, unsold. The resulting erratic distribution created uncertainty among readers and advertisers alike. It encouraged the latter to turn to alternative and more reliable media in which to reach their audience. While mindful of Kipling’s adage ‘that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane’, management frequently found it easier to give in to whatever the demand of the moment concerned rather than face an even more costly loss of production.

The 1970s had proved a disastrous decade in the industrial annals of Fleet Street. The eleven-month suspension of The Times was one that merely typified the events of the period. When Murdoch bought the paper in 1981 optimists hoped for a brighter future: the availability of labour-saving technology, a Conservative Government hostile to trade union militancy and the spectre of high unemployment that greeted those who risked their jobs were all indicators that pointed towards management being able to regain the initiative. Yet, the practice proved different from the theory. None of these factors made an appreciable whit of difference to the number of strikes that crippled Fleet Street production.

The one saving grace for executives at Gray’s Inn Road was that competitors were equally disabled by union action. In order to cope with the increased demand created by the 1978–79 shutdown of The Times, management at the Daily Telegraph had added an extra press in their machine room. When The Times was revived, sales of the Telegraph fell back accordingly, making the extra press redundant. But when in November 1982 management finally summoned the courage to remove the press, the SOGAT chapel begged to differ and responded by shutting down the paper for ten days. The dispute cost the Telegraph £1.5 million in lost copies alone.[2] The Financial Times suffered an even more devastating blow when its print workers struck in May 1983, closing the paper for ten weeks because the rival NGA and SOGAT shop stewards could not agree the pay differentials between their members (the NGA demanded a reduction in the number of hours worked and a simultaneous pay rise of 24 per cent).[3] These were not isolated incidents. In the twelve months between July 1984 and July 1985, the national dailies lost more than 85 million copies due to industrial action. In the calendar year for 1985, the figure was nearly 100 million.[4]

The Daily Telegraph dispute exemplified the extent to which production had been subcontracted to the unions. It was the shop stewards (chapel fathers), rather than management, who determined which casual shift workers were employed and with what frequency. Consequently, production staff were primarily dependent upon the patronage of their chapel fathers for their terms and conditions rather than enjoying any direct relationship with their employers. In this protective environment, the print unions had certainly been able to deliver material benefits for their members. The average wage in 1985 for Fleet Street production workers was around £18,000 a year. This compared with a Times journalist’s basic salary of £15,050. But at the highest level – such as the Linotype operators (who were still forced upon most national papers), wages in the region of £40,000 per annum could be earned. A few claimed even more. Compositors had developed such a complex pay scale, known as the ‘Scale of Prices’, that different rates were demanded according not only to the quantity of text typed but even to the point size of the type used. There was even a going rate for creating lines of blank text. And there were additional charges for making corrections, a situation which was an open inducement to make errors in the first place.[5]

That many of those printing The Times were earning more than those writing it certainly caused some ill feeling on the part of journalists struggling to meet mortgage payments and the other burdens of middle-class expectation. There was little social intercourse between the two groups. Times journalists did not trespass into the areas where their paper was printed and rarely had more than second-hand accounts of what went on under their feet in Gray’s Inn Road. Peter Stothard visited the machine room floor only once: ‘I was greeted by grown men pretending to be monkeys in a zoo,’ he recalled. ‘I did not go back. Many managers, I discovered, had rarely entered the alien territory which they were vainly charged to control.’[6] It was hard to see how management could reassert authority without taking measures that would ensure a mass walkout, the shutdown of the presses and another loss of consumer confidence in the newspaper.

The ten-week dispute at the FT had been instructive. The paper’s management had considered various options to circumvent its union members’ stranglehold. The possibility of using the T. Bailey Forman plant in Nottingham (where Christopher Pole-Carew used a non-union workforce) was considered but this still left the unions able to block distribution. In the end, the management concluded it would be best just to concede defeat as the easiest way to curtail a dispute that had already cost them in excess of £6 million.[7] Like Times Newspapers in 1978–9, the FT management had tried to take a stand – and lost. Without reliable (non-striking) distributors as well as a permanent alternative print centre manned by non-NGA-, non-SOGAT-trained staff, they could not escape the vice-like grip of the Fleet Street unions. During 1985, Rupert Murdoch set about assembling the assets that would free him from constraint. With them, the aspiration to break free from the torment of working with the print unions began to look dimly, vaguely, but tantalizingly possible. An idea that started with the intention of liberating his tabloids developed to include The Times. As for the unions, they had no idea what was about to hit them.

II

In the late 1970s, London’s ‘Docklands’ – the stretch along the River Thames from Tower Bridge out past the promontory of the Isle of Dogs – was at the nadir of its existence. During the nineteenth century the area had been the world’s busiest commercial waterway. Nor was this hive of activity dispersed when masts were replaced by funnels or by the flattening of the area by German bombs during the Blitz. Indeed, the Port of London achieved its maximum volume of trade in the early 1960s. But from then on, its decline was dramatic. The development of far larger vessels and container terminals to greet them ensured Tilbury and beyond became a more suitable entrepôt for international cargo and raw materials. More than 150,000 jobs were lost within a decade. London Docks closed in 1969. In an act of finality, its mighty basin was filled in.

During the 1980s, the desolate Docklands were given a new lease of life. Silted-up waterways were cleared and the grime was cleaned from Victorian warehouses that, converted into apartments, gave new ‘young upwardly mobile’ professionals (‘yuppies’) the faint notion of living in palazzi by the Thames. The Thatcher Government, and in particular the Environment Minister, Michael Heseltine, encouraged development in what was designated as an ‘Enterprise Zone’. Construction began on the Docklands Light Railway and towards the end of the decade the first of a series of giant towers went up at Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs offering a massive increase in available office space. In time, much of Fleet Street and the City of London would relocate there.

This renaissance of the late 1980s was still but a dim prospect when, in 1977, Bert Hardy, then chief executive at News Group Newspapers, persuaded Murdoch to acquire an eleven-acre site where the old London Docks had stood at Wapping, east of Tower Bridge. The logic was simple. The cramped and outdated machine room at Bouverie Street (where the Sun and the News of the World were printed) had reached capacity. Merely rebuilding it would not overcome the limitations of the site, which would yield far more if sold as a land redevelopment opportunity so near to the City. Although the journalists and compositors would stay at Bouverie Street (at least until a final sell-off of their part of the site), the printing of the Sun and the News of the World would be moved away to the new more spacious brownfield location of Wapping. There the land was cheap by comparison and lorries would not have to negotiate the narrow and congested streets of the old site off Fleet Street. Wapping was Bert Hardy’s brainchild and building work began in 1979. Upon acquiring The Times two years later, Murdoch truthfully reassured its nervous employees that he had no intention of moving them from Gray’s Inn Road to what many of them considered to be the uncharted wasteland of East London. The Wapping plant was being fitted out for tabloid-only production.

Building the great print hall at Wapping necessitated the destruction of five historic warehouses that had been built in 1805. Had the application come any later in the twentieth century, the growing heritage lobby – pointing to the successful conversion of other warehouses – might have succeeded in blocking the destruction. But Labour was still in power when the application was made. The real-estate aspirations of yuppies were not uppermost in the party’s mind and the dilapidated warehouses appeared merely to be grim reminders of the sort of exploitative toil that had given dockers a hereditary grievance against their employers. What was more, the Secretary of State for the Environment, Peter Shore, was the local MP. He was keen to see new jobs created in a constituency that, with the closure of the docks, desperately needed to attract fresh sources of employment. So the go-ahead was given and the five monuments to top-hatted Victorian capitalism were hit by the demolition ball. It was a decision many Labour politicians would live to regret – and not for aesthetic reasons.

The print hall that rose on the site could lay a reasonable claim to being one of the most ugly superstructures in London. A charmless box penetrated by a giant concrete ramp, its architects appeared to have an aversion to the art of simple fenestration. Resembling a giant incinerator, it was too utilitarian even to deserve membership of the ‘Brutalist’ school of design whose concrete monstrosities were at that time finally destroying the public’s strained patience with modern architecture. But it was a print hall, nothing more and nothing less, with little thought given to the eventual possibility of relocating journalists there. The building was ready for use in 1984. It had cost £72 million. All that was needed was to get the trade unions to agree to work in it.

Whatever the building’s lack of exterior decoration, on the inside it was an industrial marvel. The print hall was state of the art. Vast, like the loading bay of an aircraft carrier, it was also clean and air-conditioned. It was a world away from the Dickensian conditions and Heath Robinson contraptions familiar to Gray’s Inn Road or (worse) Bouverie Street. The printing units were bought new as the last in a line of Goss Mark I Headliner letterpress machines, a design that was a decade old but of proven quality and durability. Health and safety issues that had been a justifiable area of complaint in Bouverie Street had been addressed and management hoped the new working environment would meet with the approval of the union chapel fathers. As a softening-up episode, an aeroplane was chartered to fly them out to view a similar printing plant in operation in Finland (the original plan was for them to visit print works in Germany, but the German companies politely made it clear that they would not let Fleet Street union officials anywhere near their employees). News International’s labour relations negotiator, Bill O’Neill, accompanied the delegation to Finland, noting that many of the union officials seemed far more interested in treating it as a booze-cruise than as a first insight into their working future. For O’Neill, a subsequent trip to France with them proved to be even more of a living hell.[8]

Upon his return to London, O’Neill opened negotiations with the Bouverie Street union chapels in May 1983. The discussions were held at Wapping and the union representatives were given a tour of the plant so that they could see for themselves its capacity and capability. A myth later developed that the unions were kept in ignorance of what had been constructed at Wapping. In fact, News International had not only shown a video of the plant to chapel fathers, more than one hundred of them and their members had been given tours of the building by the end of 1984. The initial management pitch was that, although Wapping would need fewer workers, those who were employed would be better paid. O’Neill made the assurance that ‘any reduction in staffing would be achieved by natural attrition or voluntary redundancy’ and that there would not be ‘any form of compulsory termination’ for the remainder who continued on at the Bouverie Street plant.[9] But this was not good enough for the union negotiators. They maintained that, if Wapping and Bouverie Street were to coincide, the former would have to share the same overmanning and restrictive practices as the latter. This completely undermined the financial rationale behind the new plant. While O’Neill calculated that nine men could operate Wapping’s three-unit presses, the unions insisted it had to be eighteen (as at Bouverie Street). Lest O’Neill should think the unions a walkover on this matter, he was reminded by them that ‘the Daily Telegraph’s pressroom lay idle for eight years waiting on our union’s agreement’.[10] Apparently this was a source of union pride. Tony Isaacs, the SOGAT ‘Imperial Father’, did not mince his words, telling O’Neill, ‘Your initial overtures are to be likened to the back-street abortionist who not very skilfully performs his operation, removes what he thinks he should, and isn’t particularly worried about the survival of the patient.’[11]

How many men it took to stand round a press was far from being the only point of dispute. An engineer assistants’ union representative refused even to consider the Wapping proposals, claiming that if he so much as reported them back to his members there would be disruption at Bouverie Street. Others were determined to extract a price. There were even demands for ‘relocation money’ despite the fact that Wapping was closer to where most of the print workers lived than Bouverie Street. The main problem, though, was that the proposed move reignited the turf war between the NGA and SOGAT over whose members would do what at Wapping. O’Neill’s suggestion that demarcation should be the same as had prevailed at Bouverie Street was rejected. The NGA’s London deputy secretary wrote to Bruce Matthews, the new managing director of News International, assuring him that, unless the NGA prevailed over SOGAT’s competence in supervising machine manager positions, ‘there can be no question of the Wapping development coming on stream’.[12] Management’s hopes that the first press lines would be running from Wapping by November 1983 soon proved preposterously optimistic.

By February 1984, nine months after the negotiations had begun, O’Neill had come to the conclusion that the unions ‘consider[ed] the longer they wait the more anxious the company will become’. The various union chapels raised all manner of excuses to postpone or call off further negotiations unless some other grievance of the moment at Bouverie Street had been settled on favourable terms first. Given the massive cost to News International of the Wapping plant lying idle, the temptation to concede to whatever price the unions named was tempting – as the unions perhaps calculated. The interest charges alone on the plant were running at £10 million a year.[13] And, as the months rolled by, union militancy broadened and strengthened. Although there were no proposals in place to transfer the Sunday Times’s production to Wapping, the paper’s chapel officials took the pre-emptive measure of announcing they would veto any such move in the future.[14]

O’Neill came to the conclusion that if incentives had no effect, the only way to get movement was for the unions ‘to be frightened in some way’.[15] It was not clear how this could be achieved. Rather, when it came to threatening behaviour, the unions packed a formidable punch. O’Neill’s meeting with Ted Chard from SOGAT’s London Central Branch demonstrated the improbability of reaching agreement with the union whose members ran the publishing room (where the newspapers were bundled and assembled for distribution). Chard listened carefully to what O’Neill had to say about the proposals for jobs at Wapping. When the presentation drew to a conclusion, Chard stood up and asked if he had finished. O’Neill said that he had. ‘Right,’ said Chard, ‘now I will tell you a thing or two. We are leaving here. We will not be back until you have proposals that make some sense.’[16] As he stormed out, his SOGAT delegation rose and followed him out of the door. It was the end of the negotiations, although it should have come as no surprise. Shown round the pristine plant by its technical director, Ken Taylor, a senior SOGAT representative said, ‘When will you get it through your thick heads, we will never let you use it, you may as well put a match to it – or we’ll do it for you.’[17]

The negotiations to move to Wapping broke down irrevocably on 19 December 1984. In a parallel development, the Scottish union branches also refused to print the Sun at the new Kinning Park plant that had been built in Glasgow unless it was turned into a separate Scottish newspaper rather than one whose pages were transmitted from Bouverie Street. Thus News International had built two state-of-the-art print halls, at a cost in excess of £100 million, which they could not use because the unions refused to let their members work in them. Though the chapel fathers thought they had won a great triumph, they would savour it for only thirteen months. It was a Pyrrhic victory that would ensure only their total annihilation. As Rupert Murdoch had prophesied back in 1981, the unions would soon discover they had finally got the proprietor they deserved.

III

The most violent dispute during the 1970s had been outside the Grunwick photo developing plant in north London. There, a small picket of those at issue with the management was regularly reinforced by many thousands of other trade unionists, including the Yorkshire miners, who tried to prevent the non-striking employees from getting in to work there. Postal workers also got involved. By refusing to handle mail to the company, they hoped to strangle it into submission. The scenes – many of them ugly – helped to persuade the incoming Conservative Government to prevent such sympathy action. The 1980 Employment Act made ‘secondary action’ (by those not directly employed by the company in a dispute) illegal. A further Employment Act in 1982 curtailed unions’ legal immunity. Henceforth, they could be held financially liable for breaching the law. Guilt might result in a fine or being subject to injunctions to freeze assets until any contempt of court was purged. The definition of secondary action was tightened further, to include making it illegal to refuse to handle – to black in the parlance – products produced by non-union workforces. Further measures followed with the 1984 Trade Union Act which sought to make unions more transparent and accountable to their members. Legal immunity was removed if unions failed to hold secret ballots prior to calling a strike.

On paper, this was a formidable body of legislation but whether it was operable remained to be seen. SOGAT’s National Executive Council wrote to News International’s managing director to disabuse him of any thought that the 1982 Act could be deployed, adding that the union wished ‘to state emphatically that we are prepared to utilize all the resources of this society in resisting any implementation of the proposed “Act”.’ Furthermore, they demanded a carte blanche assurance that News International would not initiate legal action. The letter concluded, somewhat threateningly, ‘we rely on your good sense in co-operating with us’.[18] In line with TUC policy, SOGAT also announced that its members would not cooperate or participate in any ballots on the ‘closed shop’ arranged under the provisions of the 1982 Act.[19] Put simply, the union did not intend to recognize the law.

In July 1983, a dispute between the NGA and Eddy Shah’s Messenger Newspaper Group based in Warrington became the litmus test of whether the trade union legislation was enforceable. Shah wanted to end the closed shop and recruit non-union labour. In response, the NGA tried to prevent production of his papers and wrote to advertisers requesting them to withdraw their advertisements. NGA members brought production at the Daily Mirror to a standstill, forcing its owner, Reed International, to sell its 49 per cent shareholding in the Messenger Group. Although this sort of secondary action was illegal, the NUJ joined the assault, mandating its members not to provide the Messenger Group with any copy.

Fined £50,000 for contempt of court for persisting with secondary picketing, the NGA’s response was to refuse to pay up. An all-out siege of Shah’s Warrington plant was organized. The fine was increased to £100,000 and the union’s assets sequestrated. NGA members in London took revenge by striking on 25 November, shutting down all the national newspapers for the following day. The main attack on Shah’s print works came on the night of 29 November from a mob of four thousand ‘pickets’. Buildings were set on fire, the police lines broken and the gates repeatedly rammed (employees were on the other side of them trying to prop them up against the blows). Shah was trapped inside, fearing for his life. The situation was only saved by the timely arrival of the riot police. In Fleet Street, Shah’s greatest supporter was the young and outspoken new editor of the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil. Never one to let deferential niceties get in the way of his principles, Neil took it upon himself to place a post-midnight telephone call to the Home Secretary warning of the dire consequences of letting the mob incinerate Shah. Neil’s reward was a shutdown at his own paper when the unions refused to print the 4 December edition unless the leader column’s supportive comments towards Shah were toned down. Neil refused to be intimidated by these tactics. When the unions restarted the presses what followed that evening was a suspiciously high number of paper breaks and lost production.[20]

But the tide was turning. Eventually, in January 1984 the NGA agreed to operate within the law having lost more than £2 million of its £10 million assets in fines and fees. Eddy Shah had won. A minor proprietor of regional free sheets had taken on a national print union on principles for which no Fleet Street proprietor had been prepared to risk all. But the implications would stretch far beyond Warrington. Three important lessons had been learned. First, by legally separating his subsidiary organizations into independent companies, Shah had been able to get court injunctions against ‘secondary action’. Secondly, the police could be counted upon to help break an illegal siege of a print works. Third, the TUC might donate some financial aid (it gave the NGA £420,000) but it would not organize cross-union resistance.[21]

These lessons were not lost on Bruce Matthews, the straight-talking Australian who Murdoch had brought in as News International’s managing director. In January 1985, Matthews made the journey over to Murdoch’s house in Old Chatham, upstate New York, and outlined a scheme to switch all four of News International’s major newspapers to Wapping and ditch the existing NGA and SOGAT workforce in the process. It was a seemingly fantastical proposition. Matthews had met Tom Rice, the EETPU (electricians’ union) national secretary, and was impressed by the way his union had run a Finnish-owned paper mill in Wales after SOGAT had made unreasonable demands. Matthews proposed that EETPU members could operate Wapping. Ultimately, the EETPU would want recognition with sole bargaining rights but initially would be happy just to see its members employed without formal recognition. In one bound, News International would be rid of the NGA and SOGAT forever.

Matthews, a close follower of the Turf, was setting the stakes for an extraordinary gamble. If the NGA and SOGAT realized there were moves afoot to cut them out of working at Wapping they could call strikes at Bouverie Street and Gray’s Inn Road that would destroy Murdoch’s media empire long before he would have the chance to get production up and running at Wapping. 1985 was a particularly bad time for Murdoch to risk catastrophe. With total debts of $2.6 billion and plans to take on more with the extension into US film and television (what was to become the Fox network), he was reliant on the revenue provided by his British newspapers – revenue that accounted for almost half of News Corp’s profits. A major shutdown would finish him. But he was intrigued by Matthews’s audacious plan. Murdoch’s modus operandi was to come to decisions quickly and then stick by his word. He needed no further persuading.

On 10 February, Murdoch summoned the key personnel he would entrust with the operation to his Fifth Avenue apartment in New York and explained to them their mission. The editors of the four papers were not brought in at this stage. However, The Times’s deputy editor, Charles Wilson, was invited. Impressed not only by his work at Gray’s Inn Road but also by his handling of the fractious journalists in his brief stint editing the Chicago Sun-Times, Murdoch had decided Wilson would fulfil a central role. Those who assembled around the table were left in no doubt about the magnitude of what was being proposed. Logistically, the operation was extremely complicated. It was not just a matter of telling a group of electricians which buttons to press. Wapping had been built to print two tabloids, the Sun and the News of the World. But the idea now was to move the broadsheets, The Times and the Sunday Times, there as well. This necessitated a change in capacity. What was more, the journalists of all four papers were to be moved to the new site too. This was the second strand of the strategy. The idea was not only to dispense with the services of the NGA and SOGAT but also, in doing so, to achieve what management had failed to win during the 1978–79 shutdown – an end to double-key stroking. Henceforth, journalists would be given the technology the unions had denied them – access to computer terminals where they could type their copy straight in without having to get an NGA compositor to do it for them. Wapping would not only be a blow against trade union militancy, it would herald the long-delayed dawn of technological freedom for journalists.

It was one thing to state the objective, but Murdoch proceeded to sketch the means of pulling off the coup. In great secrecy, the computer terminals would be tested and installed at Wapping. A cover story would be created to throw suspicious observers off the scent: it would be pretended that the plant was being set up to launch a new local newspaper, the London Post. This fictitious journal would be ‘edited’ by Charles Wilson who would go through all the motions of starting up the paper as if it was for real. He would even advertise and hire journalists for it. When the plant was finally ready to print its real product – The Times and its stable mates – the unsuspecting journalists from the existing papers would be bussed in and Gray’s Inn Road and Bouverie Street evacuated. But until that moment, it would be imperative that the journalists were told nothing about what was planned for them. If news of the plot leaked out before it was ready to ‘go live’, the unions could bring News International down. And in this eventuality, not just News International but the entire national press would remain at the whim of union activism. For those let into the secret that afternoon it was a bold and exciting plan and the prospect of success was intoxicating. Flying back to London on Concorde, Wilson and his co-conspirators made the most of an otherwise almost deserted cabin. In fact, cruising at supersonic speed above the clouds, they had a party.[22]

IV

In 1814, John Walter II, the son of the founder of The Times, had wanted to use a modern steam press that could do the printing of the paper far more effectively that the existing machinery. Fearing the Ludditism of his printforce, he had the steam press installed secretly and ran off the first edition without them realizing. Clearly beaten, his workforce agreed to operate the new machinery. One hundred and seventy-one years later, Walter’s successor at The Times was contemplating the same tactic although, less certain of his print workers ability to perform a tactical retreat, he would not be offering them the option of re-employment. There was also a more recent – American – precedent for what Murdoch was planning. In 1975, Katharine Graham’s Washington Post had overcome a violent nineteen-week siege by print workers hostile to the introduction of new technology. Graham had ensured new staff were trained to do the strikers’ jobs. The striking printers retaliated by setting fire to the press room. Graham broke the siege by hiring helicopters to ferry the printing plates over the pickets’ heads. Ultimately the Post got through. Whether the British public would greet Murdoch’s attempt with the same understanding it had shown towards Kay Graham’s initiative remained to be seen. Unlike her, he was not also a benefactor of liberal causes and could more easily be painted as a bottom-line capitalist careless of his responsibilities to organized labour.

One of those who had helped do the groundwork for Kay Graham’s victory was an American-domiciled Liverpudlian, John Keating. Keating was now Murdoch’s technical director and was instrumental in advising on the installation of the Atex computer typesetting system at Wapping in a $10 million deal. With so much experience of Fleet Street’s failures, Murdoch drew on as much international talent as he could find. Christopher Pole-Carew (brought in to advise from the union busting company T. Bailey Forman) and Bill Gillespie were Englishmen, but in this respect they were in a minority. Wapping’s operational manager would be John Cowley who, like Bruce Matthews, confirmed Murdoch’s penchant for preferring tough Australians to what he frequently assumed were effete Englishmen. Charles ‘Gorbals’ Wilson was in no danger of being described as either effete or English. The upper-class Englishman Murdoch did admire, Douglas-Home, was certainly not effete. But in common with the other editors involved in the move, he did not play a leading part in the technical discussions primarily because the plan did not involve any alternation to editorial practice. Nonetheless, Douglas-Home was extremely enthusiastic about the plan and Murdoch kept him briefed on developments. As 1985 progressed, Douglas-Home was a man having to carry the burden of keeping two secrets from his close colleagues: his excitement for the Wapping project and the knowledge that he might not live long enough to see it put into operation.

The first sign that inquisitive visitors were no longer welcome at Wapping came in January when barbed wire went up around the site. In the same month, Tony Britton, News Group’s labour relations manager, rebuffed Tony Isaacs, the Imperial Father at the News of the World machine chapel, when the latter indicated he was ready to restart negotiations for working at Wapping after all. The unions had missed the boat and, having seen an opportunity to escape them for good, Murdoch was not going to send out a rescue craft to pick them up.

Without the involvement of the EETPU in recruiting suitable staff, launching Wapping would have been all but impossible.[23] With 365,000 members, the union was the eighth largest in the TUC. Since 1982, its general secretary had been Eric Hammond, a political moderate who was used to confrontation. His speeches at TUC and Labour Party conferences were usually drowned out by a chorus of jeers and catcalls leading him on one occasion to assure delegates that Hitler would have been proud of them. In the early 1980s, the EETPU’s London press branch had been led by the hard-left. But, following a thwarted attempt to merge with SOGAT, the London Branch had lost its power over employment to the area office. Hammond did not forget SOGAT’s attempt to poach his members and extinguish the union’s Fleet Street presence. He had been shown no interunion fraternity and would offer none in return. This was the man with whom Murdoch could do business.

Accompanied by Tom Rice, Hammond had his first meeting with Murdoch and Bruce Matthews on 31 January 1985. The secret gathering took place at the house of Murdoch’s intermediary, Woodrow Wyatt. It was there that Hammond made the assurance that his electricians could not only set up Wapping but also run it. From this moment onwards, what was never more than a verbal understanding became an article of faith with, in particular, Murdoch’s future riding upon it. In April, the collusion began in earnest, with Tom Rice flying out to the United States with Christopher Pole-Carew. Joined by John Keating, they toured several newspaper plants, including USA Today and the Washington Post, to see the modern technology at work.

Given the need to keep the plot a secret, the hiring of electricians for Wapping could not be done in London. Instead the EETPU did the recruitment in Southampton via an independent employment agency that conducted the interviewing (and vetting). Most of those selected were unemployed EETPU members or their friends and relatives who grasped the opportunity to get a job at what was considered a decent wage. Every day, these men were bussed the eighty miles to work at Wapping and then bussed back again. When, many months later, the plan was eventually revealed, the use of Southampton electricians caused resentment from existing London EETPU members who had been kept in the dark about it. In the view of the SOGAT general secretary, Brenda Dean, this was ‘the greatest treachery of all’.[24] But it was inconceivable that Wapping’s ‘staffing-up’ could have been kept secret if job application forms had been distributed across London.

While the covert use of the electricians to get the Wapping plant ready gathered pace, other aspects of the plan were put in motion. Merely getting the plant to function was not, in itself, enough. News International could print any number of newspapers but if they could not get them distributed properly they would just pile up at the plant’s front gate. As with its competitors, the company had a contract with British Rail to transport its papers. From the trains the bundles were taken to 250 wholesalers who then distributed them to the country’s forty thousand newsagents. But here was a snag: the wholesale workers were all SOGAT members. Thus, if the rail unions and SOGAT refused to handle newspapers coming out of Wapping they could kill the project. With great secrecy, Murdoch’s men devised a way round this hurdle: they would pull out of their contractual obligations with British Rail and sign a deal with the Australian road-freight company TNT instead. TNT depots would be used round the country, cutting out the wholesalers, and deliveries would be made directly to the newsagents.

Getting a list of all the newsagents’ addresses involved a good deal of surreptitious research and some wholesalers may have experienced the strange sensation of feeling they were being followed as they went about their work. In fact, using lorries was significantly more expensive than using trains. TNT had 1500 vehicles and Wapping’s requirement of eight hundred (and up to two thousand new drivers and distributors) was more than they could spare. In return for increasing their fleet accordingly, TNT got News International to underwrite the £7 million additional outlay if the unions did not strike and the train system could be used after all. Even with this agreement, there remained one potential snag: TNT had a closed-shop agreement with the TGWU whose members drove the lorries. If the drivers responded to their union’s call not to enter Wapping, News International would be back with the problem of having piles of newspapers and no means of distributing them. But it was a risk that had to be taken. In June 1985, TNT was given a five-year contract. Meanwhile, British Rail knew nothing of the fact they were shortly to be dumped.

By then the computer system had been installed that would revolutionize newspaper editing and production. The decision to buy Atex had been taken in March. Murdoch wanted to use a system that was tried and tested rather than state of the art because only simple processes could be quickly picked up by ‘half-trained manpower’.[25] It would be a disaster if the Wapping opportunity was squandered because staff could not figure out how to work the technology within their deadlines. It would have been easier and cheaper to use Atex’s UK subsidiary, but the risk of news of the order leaking out was considered too great. Instead, the $10 million order was placed with the US parent company. The mainframes and typesetting equipment were huge and could have attracted attention while being shipped over from Boston, so they were transported in unmarked boxes and routed via Paris just to doubly confuse anyone who was monitoring their progress. Under the direction of Ben Smylie, the American-only staff charged with creating the software and installing the equipment were also flown over, their tracks suitably covered behind them.

Away from the prying eyes of Fleet Street, ‘Smylie’s People’ (as they inevitably became known) got to work assembling the computer mainframes in a dilapidated but suitably anonymous shed by the Thames Barrier at Woolwich – codenamed ‘The Bunker’. A small plaque was affixed, announcing that the shed belonged to ‘Caprilord Limited’, the cover company created to mask Atex’s involvement. With a security guard posted to dissuade curious passers-by and the mist rising from the river, the scene had something of an illicit gangland operation about it, not least when the limousine of ‘Gorbals’ Wilson drew up to appraise the handiwork. Charged with designing the layout of the new offices as well as launching the London Post, Wilson was the Murdoch lieutenant who worked closest with the Atex team in getting the editorial floors technologically operational. Murdoch, the Godfather, visited on 20 April. On 1 May the first test run proved successful. At the end of the month the mainframes were transported over to Wapping, in the dead of night, in long, customized lorries. It was a sign of management’s jumpiness that a helicopter flying low overhead just as the lorries were passing through the gates caused momentary alarm that the move was being monitored by spies hired by the unions. But the helicopter moved on, allowing the mainframes to be unloaded and installed on the fourth floor, behind doors that needed a special code to open. Weeks of teething problems and reconfigurations lay ahead, but ‘Project X’ was well underway.

Meanwhile, back at Gray’s Inn Road the journalists were still unaware of the major news story that was waiting to burst. In league with the print unions, the NUJ prohibited any of their members from touching the three or four Atex terminals located on the editorial floor, leading one journalist to glance wistfully at the banned technology and murmur, ‘I have seen the future and it’s got dust on it.’[26] Little did he appreciate what was being installed a few miles to the east. Wilson and Douglas-Home maintained the façade. The situation was the same at the other News International titles. At the Sunday Times only the editor, Andrew Neil (who had experience of using Atex at his previous berth at The Economist), and James Adams knew what was being planned although Ivan Fallon, the deputy editor, had his suspicions confirmed.[27] But as the scheme proceeded to plan, so it became necessary to pass the ‘Wapping Cough’ onto a few more key personnel who, under the cover of sick leave, prepared the ground for the move.

In March, the company had publicly stated its intention to launch the new tabloid newspaper for the capital, the London Post. This was the biggest of all the ruses. It was not just a cover story for explaining signs of activity at Wapping. On the advice of News International’s lawyer, Geoffrey Richards at Farrar & Co., London Post (Printers) Limited was established as Wapping’s operating company. Thus, Wapping was given a separate legal identity from News Group in Bouverie Street and Times Newspapers in Gray’s Inn Road. Come a strike, this would prove significant since it would allow the trade union legislation against secondary action to be invoked. It was formally announced that Charles Wilson was the Post’s editorial director. Oddly, this did not involve his standing down as deputy editor of The Times, but this point was passed over, perhaps because Wilson was well known for his multitasking skills. He even went as far as interviewing journalists for positions on the paper. One of those who turned up naively for an interview was Julie Burchill, who was poised to emerge as one of Fleet Street’s more outspoken columnists and controversalists. Murdoch never intended the Post to see the light of day although if the unions managed, somehow, to prevent The Times and the other existing titles from being switched to Wapping, then there was the fallback possibility of launching The Post as an interim measure. In these circumstances, it might be the only way of getting Wapping operational. To that extent, the paper was not a complete fiction, but it would only hit the streets if the main plan failed and those responsible for establishing the shadow paper – in particular Charles Wilson – had no intention of letting the main plan fail.[28] Indeed, part of the cunning of the Post project was that it incited the unions to play into Murdoch’s hands. It was hoped that merely the prospect of the Post being printed without their agreement would – at the appropriate moment – provoke the Sun, News of the World, Times and Sunday Times printers to come out on strike. In doing so they would provide Murdoch with the grounds to sack them and move his four papers to Wapping where they would be printed by staff happy to work there.

Wilson was the right man for the job. At the Chicago Sun-Times he had experienced at first hand how complete editorial control could work. At the Sun-Times, suggestions were acted upon at a time when in Fleet Street they would have created only months of consultation, negotiation and eventual cancellation. What was more, unlike Douglas-Home, Wilson understood the technical side of production. He brought a tight group of lieutenants with him to head-up the Post: Mike Hoy, Richard Williams, David Banks, John Bryant and (later) Tim Austin. All believed it was the Post they were working on. Sworn to secrecy, they were installed in a back room at Gray’s Inn Road and even accessed the building from a different entrance. In charge of subbing dummies of the paper, Austin was sent across to the Chicago Sun-Times for a fortnight’s crash course on using the computer technology.[29]

The extent of the conspirators’ secrecy seemed extreme: meeting venues were checked for bugs and long-range listening devices; key executives were advised to trim trees and bushes in their gardens in case they camouflaged eavesdroppers and to consider buying a dog. Ex-Royal Navy, Christopher Pole-Carew was in charge of directing the Wapping defences. When, after he had listed the security measures, Murdoch asked if there was anything else, Pole-Carew replied, ‘well, that’s all we can do, unless we use guns’. This was doubtless intended as a joke, although the nervous glance exchanged by Murdoch and Wilson suggested the need for reassurance. The subsequent proposal that the way to defeat the pickets’ interference with small lorries coming into the plant was to file the underside of the lorries’ bumpers to razor sharpness was not taken up. Some wondered if Pole-Carew was becoming overzealous.

In fact, the need for vigilance – rather than vigilante-ness – was real. Comings and goings at Wapping were being monitored by Tony Cappi, a SOGAT member, and Terry Ellis of the AUEW. By establishing contacts with those contracted to set up the plant, they were able to gain intelligence reports on what was going on behind the Wapping barbed wire. They discovered that Atex mainframes had been installed. To a sales manager of NAPP Systems, they posed as potential customers interested in purchasing photopolymer printing plates. They were told the company was supplying Wapping. Some of the work could be explained away as ongoing preparation for the Post’s launch if or when the unions gave it the go-ahead. But the Post was to be a tabloid. In May, Cappi and Ellis learned that the presses were being configured to print broadsheets. Cappi left an urgent message at the office of SOGAT General Secretary Brenda Dean and finally got to speak to her in June. From that moment on, he was a regular supplier of information.[30] In July, Dean had a meeting with the various chapel fathers, but it was not until the following month that, accompanied by SOGAT and NGA officials, she managed to get an appointment to speak with Bruce Matthews and Pole-Carew at Bouverie Street. The extent to which these two men provided obfuscatory answers was evident in the subsequent statement Dean released:

I am pleased to say that they both totally denied that any personnel were being recruited or were currently working in the premises being trained in jobs traditionally done by SOGAT members. The electricians and engineers working in the plant are engaged on the installation of electrical wiring and equipment.[31]

But it was not long before Brenda Dean had cause to doubt the helpful explanations she had received. By September, Cappi’s spies had copied the names and numbers of over five hundred people with access to working at Wapping. Dean was in Blackpool for the last day of the TUC conference when she received a telephone call from a spy informing her that dummy runs of the Post had been successfully run off the Wapping presses. This was incontrovertible proof that the electricians were doing rather more than a bit of wiring. They were actually printing newspapers. Dean immediately got in touch with Tony Dubbins of the NGA and the various London officials. ‘My own view,’ she told them, ‘is that we should stop the whole of News International tonight.’ Dubbins pondered the options. Militants subsequently believed Dean had been slow to ascertain the seriousness of the situation although, according to her own recollection, she said:

Come on! Let’s get real about this. Fleet Street stops at the drop of a hat for absolutely bugger all. This is not about money it’s about jobs. We need to get home to Murdoch that we’re not having it. We want to get to that negotiating table now, before they go any further … What’s wrong with you all? Now’s the time to strike! What’s wrong with you all?

She was sure that Murdoch was playing for time but, if confronted with the shutdown of all four of his titles, he would have to respond and respond on terms dictated by the unions. Back at home, at tea time on the Saturday, she got a call from SOGAT’s general officer, Bill Miles. He said he had had a meeting with Bruce Matthews and the News International management. They had offered negotiations for the unions to work at Wapping and, therefore, the members had decided not to call a lightning strike. ‘Of course,’ Miles added, ‘the chapels have said if you as General Secretary instruct them to come out, they’ll stop the job tonight.’ There was a short pause. ‘Bill,’ sighed Dean, ‘if they’re not prepared to stand up for themselves, I’m not prepared to put the union on the line for them.’

Thus the unions missed their opportunity to bring down Murdoch’s media empire at the moment of his greatest vulnerability – while he was heavily in debt because of his expensive acquisitions in the American market and before he was ready to launch Wapping to produce the newspapers that kept him creditworthy. Instead the unions opted to be locked into months of fruitless negotiations during which time Wapping was brought into operational readiness. ‘It was like a wife who is told her husband is playing away but refuses to accept it is happening’ was how Wilson interpreted the moment of union self-denial.[32] Reflecting on the missed opportunity eighteen years later, Dean could still not comprehend how such a ‘major tactical error’ could have been made. ‘It was a complete reverse of normal animal behaviour from our people,’ she concluded. ‘Normally they took action first and asked questions after.’[33]

V

The most important twenty months in Fleet Street’s history passed between February 1985 and October 1986. In the popular market, News International faced sharper competition from Robert Maxwell’s Mirror Group where a redundancy package was ruthlessly forced through. In the midmarket, there was the promise of similar savings at the Express while a new newspaper, Today, was planned by Eddy Shah using the latest technology and avoiding the traditional print unions. There was a similar situation in the broadsheet market where The Times faced new threats not only from its principal rival, the Daily Telegraph, which was rescued from bankruptcy, but from the launch of a new newspaper, the Independent, proudly trumpeting its sovereignty from traditional press baron ownership. In the space of twenty months, Fleet Street was destroyed as the capital of the newspaper kingdom.

The catalyst for some of these changes was an event Murdoch had originally opposed – the flotation of Reuters. In return for bailing the news agency out in 1941, the various Fleet Street titles, through the Newspaper Publishers’ Association, had taken on a 41 per cent share in the company. Diversification into financial services information technology had subsequently made Reuters profitable. Its profits had quadrupled in Gerald Long’s last year as its managing director and doubled again in 1982. By purchasing Times Newspapers, Murdoch had doubled his potential shareholding. If it was floated on the stock exchange, it could realize him between £90 and £100 million. As one of the ten directors on the Reuters board, Murdoch thus had an interest in pushing for the company to be floated. But floating Reuters was against the spirit of the terms that had been agreed in 1941 (in a document drawn up by William Haley who was subsequently The Times’s editor). What was more, it would give Murdoch no obvious advantage over his Fleet Street rivals since they would all make similar gains. He did not push for Reuters to be floated. But others on the board were intent on liquidating their assets and in 1984 the company was duly quoted on the stock exchange. While Murdoch chose to hold onto his shares, rivals went for the quick profit. The Guardian realized £70 million, paying off all its debts as a consequence and laying the groundwork for a new printing plant in London’s Docklands. Associated Newspapers, owner of the Daily Mail and a range of regional titles, netted the most. By 1990, it had realized £300 million from its Reuters shares and built new print works in Docklands. Across Fleet Street, proprietors now had the ready money to push for expansion.[34]

With these proceeds, plans could be laid for new and less labour-intensive printing plants. Robert Maxwell even raised the prospect of colour printing. A clash with the unions was imminent. In the second half of 1985, the warning shots began to be fired. The new chairman of the Express titles, David Stevens, made no secret of his hopes to move his papers out of Fleet Street and to reduce the payroll. Even more significant from Murdoch’s perspective was the determination to cut out waste by Robert Maxwell who, in 1984, had controversially bought Mirror Group Newspapers. A dispute at the Sporting Life had led to his Mirror titles being suspended for a fortnight in August 1985. Vowing ‘the gravy train has hit the buffers’, he retaliated with a major redundancy programme to cut the total of his employees from 7000 to 2100. A two-week closure at the home of his Scottish papers ensued. Maxwell emerged victorious by deploying a mixture of barbed wire, security guards, threats to move from Glasgow and employ non-union workers and the deployment through the courts of the Thatcher Government’s trade union legislation.[35] Some thought these methods incompatible with Maxwell’s socialist protestations. But while he had used all means available to him to cut the payroll, he did not destroy the principles of chapel power: the absence of legally binding contracts and retention of the closed shop. In common with every other newspaper proprietor, his journalists still did not have direct input of their own material.

Although not one of the beneficiaries of the Reuters largesse, Eddy Shah, survivor of the Messenger dispute, had begun to think beyond the confines of Warrington and was envisaging a far more revolutionary plan. He conceived a new mid-market national newspaper to be called Today, edited by Brian MacArthur. Loosely modelled on USA Today, it would transmit its papers via satellite to regional printing plants in Heathrow, Birmingham and Manchester. In doing so it would be free from Fleet Street’s restrictive practices and could thus be produced at a cost that significantly undercut the existing titles. Extraordinarily, its planners budgeted that it could break even without any advertising on sales of 600,000. What was more, by using the latest technology and printing in colour it would be attractive to readers. Its journalists would have direct input. The union boss who was able to deliver these non-restrictive practices was none other than Eric Hammond of the EETPU. Buoyed up by his successful negotiations with Murdoch, Hammond had approached Shah in April 1985 with a no-strike guarantee that became public three months later.[36] Like Murdoch, Today’s founder also planned distribution by road not rail. Eddy Shah threatened not just the traditional print unions but also the traditional press barons. If Today’s colour technology worked and the Sun failed to be moved to Wapping, Murdoch faced serious competition.

The plans for moving The Times to Wapping were in their final stages when, on 27 December 1985, the Financial Times broke the news that a paper called the Independent was to be launched in the new year. It would be the first new national quality broadsheet to enter the market since the Daily Telegraph, 131 years earlier. At first, it was hard to comprehend how serious a threat it would pose. Like opposing groups of First World War sappers mining underneath each other’s trenches, the plans for launching the Independent and for relocating The Times to Wapping had been evolving in total ignorance of the other’s existence. The three founding fathers of the Independent, Andreas Whittam Smith, Matthew Symonds and Stephen Glover, were all respected journalists at the Daily Telegraph. This was significant. The Times’s principal rival was in serious trouble. Its owner, Lord Hartwell, had decided to provide it with expensive and modern print works in Manchester and London’s Isle of Dogs at a combined cost that soon exceeded £100 million. Union militancy had ensured that the level of overmanning at the Telegraph had been such that it made The Times look like a comparatively lean operation. This was one of the reasons why the market leader, with daily sales in excess of 1.2 million, somehow managed to be a money loser. The new print works would produce a better paper at a lower cost but in the short term only added to Hartwell’s headache: the proposed redundancy scheme alone was estimated at £38 million. Having greatly overstretched his resources – and his Reuters payout – he scraped around for ways to raise money. When the take-up on his share offer was less than expected, the Canadian businessman Conrad Black scented blood. Black bought a 14 per cent stake together with a first-refusal option on any future share offers. Hartwell soon found himself forced into a fresh share issue that Black duly snapped up. By December 1985, Black had secured a majority stake and made Andrew Knight chief executive. For the gentlemanly Hartwell, who since 1954 had been editor-in-chief of a paper his father had bought and vastly improved in 1928, it was undoubtedly sad to see his own position become effectively honorific. Yet, he was to live long enough to see Knight and Black turn the bankrupt company around.[37] With the Telegraph saved and poised for rejuvenation and the Independent about to be launched, the future for The Times looked to be a lean one unless it could reap the advantages involved in Project Wapping.

VI

In 1985, SOGAT’s general secretary, Brenda Dean, was forty-three years old and in only her first year in the post. She was the first woman to head a major British trade union. What was more, in taking care of her appearance and with an elegant blonde bouffant (rather, if truth be told, in the manner of Margaret Thatcher), she appeared the antithesis of the traditional union brotherhood. This was both her strength – as far as the public was concerned – and her weakness when it came to dealing with the (resolutely male) Fleet Street chapels. She did not come from a particularly entrenched union background (her father had been a British Railways inspector) and grew up in Salford. This caused some misgivings among those in the London Central branch who considered themselves a class apart and disliked the interference of supposed no-nothing provincials in their affairs.[38] Doubtless, some were also alarmed that she was dating the CBI’s director of information. But she was devoted to the union that she had joined not long after leaving school at sixteen to become a shorthand typist. During the 1970s she even turned down the options of a safe Labour seat or membership of the Downing Street think tank in order to manage SOGAT’s affairs. Her tenure as secretary of the Greater Manchester branch had coincided with a doubling of the membership. By 1983 she had risen to national president and two years later to the key position of general secretary.

Shortly after taking command of SOGAT, Dean made a ten-day visit to the United States to examine the effect of the introduction of new technology. She concluded in her report that ‘opposition is not an option, it is simply a rapid road to de-unionization’. In writing this, she was taking a bold stand for modernization that would involve, in particular, confronting the short-term interests not only of her Fleet Street members but also those of the rival union, the NGA, which was still committed to the absurdity of double-key stroking. There was little love lost. Her first direct experience of Fleet Street negotiating had come shortly after the end of the 1978–9 shutdown at Times Newspapers. She was not impressed. ‘It was negotiation with mob instincts,’ she concluded. Incredulous at the salaries some of the printers were earning she told the journalist Linda Melvern: ‘I don’t know what they spend it on. They all live in council houses.’[39] Had she been in a position to enforce such views some years earlier, her union might never have been locked out from Wapping.

Instead the negotiations for the print unions’ participation at Wapping recommenced on 30 September with Dean and the other union leaders convening at the Inn on the Park to hear Murdoch’s terms. Murdoch’s Gulfstream G3 had narrowly avoided Hurricane Gloria on its route before decanting Murdoch, John Keating and Bill O’Neill at Stansted airport. The union bosses could have been forgiven for imagining the trip had affected the chairman’s mood. But, assisted in the drafting by Charles Wilson, he had carefully prepared a statement – which The Times proceeded to print in full.[40] He made clear that the negotiations would only concern the proposal to print the London Post. If successful, the terms could then be extended to embrace printing the Sun and the News of the World there too. The implication was that The Times and Sunday Times would continue, as before, to be printed from Gray’s Inn Road. The union representatives had to listen while Murdoch made clear he was tired of employing workers who managed twenty hours a week at double the national average wage; tired of some of them getting as much as twelve weeks holiday; tired of a system in which he could only employ whoever the unions offered for a vacancy:

I have strained myself and my colleagues physically, emotionally and financially to build this business and we have been met with nothing but cynicism, broken promises and total opposition … The result today is that all national newspaper production departments are over manned by from fifty to three hundred per cent, with working practices that are a continuing disgrace to us all.[41]

The irony, of course, was that on this occasion it was News International that would be negotiating in bad faith. Having determined to operate Wapping without the traditional print unions, Murdoch’s men were not about to undo all the secretive planning by a last-minute U-turn. Instead, with delays in getting the new Times editorial floor ready, the negotiations would serve a purpose in buying time for Wapping to become operational. What was more, the talks could be confidently predicted to show the print unions unwilling to accept the modern working practices the project demanded.

News International set a three month deadline for the talks to be concluded. In charge of the negotiating team was Bill O’Neill who, after a year in the United States, made a poor job of hiding his depression at having to be back in the company of many of those who had made his life a misery the last time he had attempted to get them to operate Wapping. For their part, the unions knew enough about ‘Project X’ to fear the prospect of a breakdown in the talks. This time they really did want an agreement. Nonetheless, they reacted in disbelief at O’Neill’s insistence that management would determine the appropriate number of men to work a press. ‘You are trying to introduce the work practices of an alien continent,’ one of the NGA’s team spluttered. O’Neill replied that the far off land was called ‘the real world’.[42]

Between mid-October and the end of the negotiations, O’Neill conducted thirty-two meetings with the unions. He made clear that journalists on the Post would have direct input of their own copy; that there would be no union ‘closed shop’ circumscribing who could be employed; that there would be legally binding contracts; that disputes would be settled by legally binding arbitration not by strikes (anyone who struck during his contract period would be sacked without appeal); and that management had the right to introduce new technology even if it involved cutting staff. In essence the package heralded the end of the multiple-chapel system that had plagued attempts to make fast agreements. As to what would have happened if the unions had agreed to all News International’s terms, O’Neill later conceded, ‘while what was presented was not uncommon in U.S. labour contracts, it was completely foreign and unacceptable at that time to the unions I was meeting with. They could never have accepted them and a strike was inevitable’.[43]

Given their previous attitude, it was a sign of how scared the unions were that they were nonetheless prepared to make some major sacrifices. On 22 November, the NGA conceded direct input to journalists in return for a fifty-fifty representation with SOGAT for double-stroking the columns of advertising. For the first time in the history of Fleet Street, journalists’ copy would not be needlessly retyped by members of a print union. In other areas there appeared little progress. The unions continued to oppose legally binding contracts. Complaining that he had endured ‘seventeen years of hell’, Murdoch made clear this was non-negotiable. When Eric Hammond broke ranks to state that the EETPU had no objection to legally binding contracts, the other unions recognized that they were being outmanoeuvred. On 11 December, they reported the EETPU to the TUC, hoping disciplinary action would be taken against its non-collective attitude.[44]

With Brenda Dean in the chair, the print unions – temporarily putting aside their traditional suspicions of each another – debated what to do at a meeting in the TUC’s Congress House on 9 December. Various rumours were discussed, including that News International had developed ‘connections’ with TNT to deliver the newspapers and sidestep the SOGAT distribution system and the apparent presence of one thousand workers recruited by the EETPU who were up to something ‘within the Wapping development’. Most alarming of all was the ‘information received informally’ that a sixty-page dummy equivalent of the Sunday Times had been run off the Wapping presses and that ‘there was adequate space and machinery to move in all the titles. Indeed there were rumours that Times journalists had already been told they would be moving to Wapping.’ This last piece of news was wrong – Times journalists had heard nothing – but what was most remarkable about the union meeting was the conclusions drawn from the evidence. Through united action, the unions believed they retained the whip hand since ‘at the present time, sixty per cent of the worldwide income of News International was raised by The Sun and the News of the World; the proprietor would not wish to place either in jeopardy’. Consequently the committee drew up a draft proposal for solidarity in opposing Murdoch’s humiliating terms.[45]

The deadline for the talks with News International was Christmas Eve. The last meeting before it, attended by the full union top brass, including Dean and Harry Conroy of the NUJ (whose opening gambit was to ask where O’Neill’s black shirt was), broke up without any agreement on 19 December. Three days later, O’Neill telephoned Dean to see if she wanted to talk further. She replied that there was no point. The following day, Bill Miles wrote to Bruce Matthews to inform him that the print unions were united in demanding that News International offer all those it currently employed jobs for life with wage increases ‘not least [sic] than the annual retail price index’. If there was a transferral to new premises ‘you will guarantee that the members of the unions concerned will be offered employment at the alternative premises with full continuity of employment at their prevailing wages and conditions’. If these demands were not met the unions would go on strike.[46]

The demand was fantastic, incredible. Murdoch had hoped the three-month negotiating period would demonstrate the print unions’ reluctance to agree legally binding contracts to work at Wapping, but he could scarcely believe his luck when they threatened to bring down the company if all their members were not granted jobs for life. It was hard to conceive what more the unions could have done to publicize their imperviousness to moderation. In doing so they determined to make a stand upon a battlefield whose topography was all against them. Instead of appearing the aggrieved party forced into industrial action by a callous boss’s use of blackleg labour from a covert plant, they ensured that Murdoch could be seen as the put-upon businessman calling upon a coalition of the willing against Luddite militants who had silenced his existing plants in the pursuit of wholly unreasonable demands.

In fact, News International’s lawyer, Geoffrey Richards of Farrar & Co., had skilfully manoeuvred the unions into this situation. The Wapping plant was legally distinct from News International’s other operations. Since a strike at Gray’s Inn Road and Bouverie Street on the issue of preventing EETPU members working at Wapping would be illegal under secondary action legislation, the print unions had to make an unacceptable demand (‘jobs for life’) knowing it would be rejected so that they could legally call a strike that would coincide with Wapping’s launch. But they were playing directly into Murdoch’s hands. Had they not struck, News International would have had to pay their wages for a further six months while the existing house agreements were still in force. Their decision to strike not only relieved Murdoch of that burden but also of the £40 million redundancy payments to which they would otherwise have been legally entitled.

The print unions opted to strike because they were confident of success. Indeed, their strategy was based upon a fatal assumption that a financially stretched Murdoch could not bring his papers out if the NGA and SOGAT called industrial action. Bill Miles had been looking into the financial structure of News International and concluded that its gearing was far too high for Murdoch to put at risk his Fleet Street cash crop. News Corp. had borrowed $2.6 billion to acquire the American companies that would become its Fox film and television empire. A huge debt burden was being carried. This, it was predicted, was his Achilles heel. Union colleagues complacently assured Brenda Dean that not a single paper would emerge from the Wapping plant without the guiding expertise of SOGAT and NGA members. ‘My view,’ Dean later admitted, ‘was they couldn’t sustain a stoppage of two weeks without any papers at all so there would have needed to be a negotiation.’ Even if – as she thought more likely – Wapping managed a limited production run, Murdoch would still have to climb down or face financial meltdown.[47] On 13 January 1986, SOGAT’s strike ballots were sent out to their members. The siege of Fortress Wapping was about to begin.

VII

The following day The Times’s widely respected subeditor, Tim Austin, received a phone call. It was Charles Wilson, on typical form: ‘I want to meet you early tomorrow morning. Early for you. I’ll meet you eight o’clock at Waterloo. I’ll be in my car. Don’t miss me. If you do, you’re a dead man.’ Despite having spent the last few months with Richard Williams and Michael Hoy assisting Wilson on the London Post start-up, Austin had no idea what the new Times editor was talking about. Nonetheless, he did not want to miss out and arrived two trains earlier than was strictly necessary. Eventually, Wilson’s chauffeured limousine drew up. The back seat window glided down. ‘Get in,’ Wilson commanded, ‘I’m taking you to Wapping. That’s where we’re printing’ – Austin finished the editor’s sentence – ‘the Post?’ The editor smiled thinly. ‘Just wait,’ he murmured. The limousine passed over Tower Bridge and turned east along the Wapping Highway and down Virginia Street. Then Austin got his first sight of what he subsequently described as ‘this hideous vision of barbed wire, ten-foot-high steel fences and this ghastly building’. ‘Just look at that,’ Wilson cut in admiringly. ‘That place is going to change your life!’[48]

Over the next few days Wilson repeated the journey taking the newspaper’s key personnel one at a time to visit the plant on the condition they were sworn to absolute secrecy. Most knew the company had plans for Wapping – The Times had, after all, reported the breakdown in the Post negotiations – but only a handful had any idea that a whole new Times office had been constructed within an anonymous looking single-storey East End warehouse.[49] The vast majority of the editorial staff remained totally in the dark. The pressure upon Wilson over the past months had been tremendous. He had been dividing his time between The Times – which, with Douglas-Home’s removal to hospital, he was assuming much of the burden of editing – and the Wapping project where he was giving the impression he was setting up the Post, issuing instructions and interviewing staff for it as well as designing the layout and overseeing the equipping of The Times’s new office. For months without let up, his day started before dawn when he awoke and read the morning’s papers. Then he would go to Gray’s Inn Road to discuss the day’s agenda with the news desk. After the morning conference at 10.30 he would work on administration matters in his office until slipping out to go to Wapping. There he would confer with the Atex staff and continue the direction of laying out The Times’s new office. He would return to Gray’s Inn Road for the afternoon conference at 4.30 and stay there until the first edition had left the stone after 8 p.m. On his way home, he would call in on the Atex staff for a drink in their Belgravia ‘safe house’. That nobody who was not in on the secret knew Wilson was leading this demanding double life was a tribute to his organizational powers and resilience. Nor was it just the journalists who remained in the dark. When the directors of the Times Newspapers (Holdings) board had met on 10 December, they were given scant indication from Murdoch that The Times was about to move home. The meeting lasted forty-five minutes. When it next convened, the move had taken place.[50] There was only one major lapse in the security and this came, unaccountably, from Bruce Matthews. The managing director took it upon himself to tell Andrew Knight, the incoming chief executive of The Times’s great rival, the Telegraph, the details and even the exact timing of the move to Wapping when he met him, for the first time, in late December. He then updated Knight several times during the first fortnight of the new year. ‘The information was critically important for us,’ Knight subsequently admitted, although, no less amazingly, the news never leaked out from the executive floor of the Telegraph’s offices.[51] It was a bizarre and crazy risk for Matthews to have taken which defied any obvious business logic. Fortunately, the leak spread no further.

It was too soon to give the game away to the unions but just the right moment to antagonize them into making a false move that would put them - in the public’s eyes – in the wrong. On the night of 18 January 1986, while the union ballot papers were still being filled in, a twelve-page supplement for the Sunday Times was printed at Wapping. In an act of conscious provocation it was an ‘Innovation Special’ featuring the new plant, its possibilities and confrontational contributions from Murdoch and the editor, Andrew Neil, in a leader column. Murdoch anticipated that printing the supplement would bring an instant shutdown at Gray’s Inn Road, where the other sections of the paper were going to press. A police helicopter with search beam hovered above the Wapping plant looking for (non-existent) saboteurs while the company executives, joined by lawyer Geoffrey Richards, stood waiting for the expected enemy to show itself. Suspecting a trap, Brenda Dean issued a statement telling her members to hold fire, before making clear ‘we are not prepared to see our members treated like eighteenth century mill-workers or Australian convicts’. Down in the cramped print room at Gray’s Inn Road, a heated exchange took place between Bill Gillespie, TNL managing director, and Roy ‘Ginger’ Wilson of the SOGAT machine room chapel. The result was that the printers brought the main section of the Sunday Times out as slowly as possible, achieving only half the print run. It was a final, albeit typical, gesture.[52]

The union high command was not going to be rushed into wildcat action before the confidently predicted results of the official ballots were announced. In any case, they did not want to damage the possibility that through a broad based demonstration of union solidarity they could successfully breach Fortress Wapping. One possibility was that the EETPU members could be persuaded not to work the presses. Another was to convince the journalists to down pencils. The first prospect quickly receded. Although the TUC general secretary, Norman Willis, worked on a plan to get the print unions to make further concessions and for Eric Hammond to come into line, Hammond would not be moved. In his defence, he cited the law. His members had individual contracts to work at Wapping but the EETPU itself had no formal agreement. Thus, in the terms of the trade union legislation on secondary action, the EETPU could not order a strike against a company with which it had no contractual agreement.[53] Bill O’Neill was of the view that even if Hammond had asked his electricians not to work at Wapping, they would have carried on regardless.[54] They wanted the work. They needed the money. As for the journalists, the print unions could expect a show of solidarity from NUJ activists, but could not be confident that journalists whose hard work had so frequently been spiked by militancy in the print room would leap to their aid. At a meeting on 21 January, The Times NUJ chapel duly instructed its members that, in the event of a strike by the NGA and SOGAT, journalists were only to do their work ‘using existing personnel and technologies’ and ‘not to enter the Wapping plant.’ Since ‘existing technologies’ involved all articles being double-key stroked by NGA members, the NUJ was effectively serving notice that it would be joining the strike.[55] Times staff would have to decide whether they were primarily loyal to their union or to their employer. Given the secretive manner in which their move to Wapping was being planned behind their backs, some felt their employer had yet to demonstrate loyalty to them.

Later the same day, the results of the print unions’ ballots were released. Among SOGAT members, the vote was 3534 for striking and 752 against (an 82 per cent yes vote); the margin was similar among NGA members with 843 voting yes and 117 voting no (an 87.8 per cent yes vote).[56] On 23 January, Murdoch agreed to meet Brenda Dean and her colleagues in two hours of talks at the Park Lane Hotel. He offered new five-year contracts for ‘some hundreds’ of the five thousand print workers currently employed on his four titles so that they could continue printing editions from Bouverie Street and Gray’s Inn Road, but he would no longer entertain print union representation at Wapping. For her part, Dean went as far as she possibly could to make last-minute concessions on management’s ‘right to manage,’ binding arbitration and a prohibition of wildcat strikes. Such concessions were probably too great for her members and too late for Murdoch. The meeting broke up with neither side accepting its opponent’s offers. ‘It’s tragic that they’ve missed this opportunity,’ Murdoch announced to the waiting press; ‘we have been begging the unions to come to an agreement at Wapping for six years now. Earlier on we would have given them all sorts of things.’[57] The following day, the print unions’ national executives brought their members out on strike. All five and a half thousand of them – printers, typists, telephonists, librarians, clerks, cleaners – were duly sacked.

On the evening of Friday 24 January, Bill O’Neill telephoned Brenda Dean. She confirmed the strike was on and in the course of an amicable conversation made clear she thought it would be over within a fortnight when, unable to print enough newspapers or get them distributed, News International would reopen negotiations. It was easy to understand the unions’ optimism. They did not think Wapping had the capacity. They knew it took all ninety press units at Gray’s Inn Road to print the Sunday Times and that there were only forty-eight available units at Wapping. But what they did not calculate was that the Wapping employees were prepared to work using methods that kept the newsprint flowing without constant stops to reload and that Wapping staff were able to average about fifty thousand copies an hour. This was more than double what NGA and SOGAT members at Gray’s Inn Road had felt within their powers to produce.

Yet even if Wapping’s electricians managed to bring the papers out, SOGAT was still confident of preventing distribution. Eighteen hundred SOGAT members were employed at the ninety depots of the country’s biggest newspaper wholesaler, WH Smith. Dean promised they would black all News International titles. The union also hoped to prevent production at subsidiary plants in Merseyside, Watford and Manchester where the colour magazines for the Sunday Times and News of the World, together with extra copies of the tabloid’s main section, were printed. Furthermore, Dean had met Ron Todd of the TGWU before Christmas to insist that his members did not drive TNT lorries carrying the papers. Approaches were also made to ASLEF and the NUR to prevent rail distribution.[58] On the night of 23 January, the print union and transport union officials met to coordinate disrupting distribution from Wapping. Together they would show Murdoch who was boss. That night, The Times’s deputy editor, Colin Webb, was down on ‘the stone’ and was surprised to witness the print workers’ cheerful attitude. ‘We’re off for a weekends’ golf’, they assured him; ‘see you Tuesday when Rupert gives in.’[59]

VIII

On the morning of 24 January, Rupert Murdoch, Charles Wilson and Peter Stothard stood in The Times vestibule at Gray’s Inn Road waiting to greet Shimon Peres, the Israeli Prime Minister. A semicircle of angry print workers faced them. One member of the reception committee quipped mirthlessly that the Israeli security guards might have to protect the hosts rather than the guest.[60] Throughout the building, Times journalists wondered who, if anybody, was going to print the paper that evening. The editor, whom they looked to for leadership and protection, had told them nothing. There had been no mention of moving to Wapping at the morning news conference chaired by Colin Webb. At 7.30 p.m., a PA wire confirmed that the strike was going ahead as planned. Desperate to find out what was afoot, a demand was made for the editor to address his staff in a room journalists had booked in Holborn. Webb, however, took the view that Wilson should not answer a summons as if to some revolutionary tribunal but, rather, should call the staff to hear him, and to do so on the home territory of Gray’s Inn Road.[61] This was psychologically astute. Wilson had been editor for only three months. What was more, he had spent much of the past two years away from The Times office, first in Chicago and subsequently hovering around Wapping. Consequently, he had not had a chance to sustain the personal following or natural authority that the late Charles Douglas-Home could have commanded in the situation. Yet, if journalists did not respond to his appeal, not only Wapping but the future of The Times would hang in the balance.

It was not until 8.20 p.m. that Charles Wilson finally strode into a room packed with tense journalists. To rise above the scrum he clambered on top of a table. Hush descended. It was noticed that he was visibly shaking. ‘The storm has broken tonight,’ he declared: ‘We have lost tonight’s paper. But we do not intend to lose any more editions of The Times. It is going to be produced editorially at Wapping – on Sunday night for the Monday paper. I am here to invite you to come along and help us do it.’

He told them to clear their desks of all their possessions – this would be their last day at Gray’s Inn Road – and announced the news that the Sun’s journalists had just voted overwhelmingly to go to Wapping. Times staff refusing to go there would be sacked for breach of contract. Those who went to Wapping would get a £2000 pay rise and free private health insurance for their family. But more to the point, they would be free at last to type their own articles straight into the editorial system. ‘At a single key stroke, this gives the journalist his birthright,’ he declaimed. ‘I implore you to come with us.’[62]

Had the appeal worked? One journalist was heard to whisper ‘he’s won’, but the tone of the questions asked was hostile and there was considerable muttering as the packed meeting dispersed. That the editor had conspired with Murdoch but not involved or even forewarned his own staff was seen as a betrayal. He had put a gun to his journalists’ heads, informing them at almost the last possible moment to move everything to some probably hideous site somewhere in the East End of London (of all places) or be sacked. Such dismissive treatment infuriated those who felt they were professionals being hired or fired like casual cleaners. One journalist went up to Wilson and hissed ‘I hate you for this’. Greg Neale, The Times NUJ chapel father, convened the second chapel meeting of the day at 9.30 p.m. It took the decision for a mass meeting the following afternoon. The journalists would not be taken for granted.

The last piece of filed copy for the never-to-appear Times that evening reported that there would be an-all night vigil at St Bride’s, ‘the journalists’ church’ in Fleet Street, for the future of the newspaper industry.[63] Only as the journalists filed out of Gray’s Inn Road that night did it really dawn on them they might never return there. Most of the cars had been moved from the surrounding streets and police ringed the building. The magnitude of what was happening only struck one journalist when he spotted the editor’s secretary, Liz Seeber, pulling paintings of past proprietors (she could not find a screwdriver) off the panelled editorial walls. Seeber recalled:

I had my car outside the reception door and Joe [the editor’s chauffeur] was down there reclining and having a fag and then he rang me the moment the SOGAT official disappeared around the corner. So I rushed down to the car and shoved the paintings into my car and Joe had the others and we all went off to Wapping at about ten o’clock at night.[64]

But would the journalists – hurt at being taken for granted – follow the oil paintings of Murdoch’s predecessors?

CHAPTER SIX

FIFTY-FOUR WEEKS UNDER SIEGE

The Siege of Wapping and its Consequences

I

‘History is rarely so convenient, but the day that production began at Wapping was the day when, to all intents and purposes, old Fleet Street ended.’[1] The assessment by the financial historian David Kynaston has become the accepted judgment on the cold, miserable day of Saturday 25 January 1985.

The events of that day took place in the teeth of opposition not only from the print unions but also from the journalists’ representatives. The National Union of Journalists had instructed its members not to go to Wapping. Journalists at the Sun and the News of the World voted overwhelmingly to disregard the order.[2] But the ballot among Times and Sunday Times journalists was reckoned to be a close call. The Times NUJ chapel met in the ‘ballroom’ (the term was not descriptive) of the Royal National Hotel in Bloomsbury. Joining Greg Neale, the chapel father, were the NUJ general secretary, Harry Conroy, and his deputy, Jake Ecclestone. The presence of the union’s high command demonstrated how seriously they took the matter. But Conroy, a bluff left-wing Glaswegian, was not naturally appealing to the softer spoken sections of the audience while many remembered Ecclestone, a former Times chapel father, as the man whose militancy had led to the paper being sold to Rupert Murdoch in the first place. For the moment, though, such splitist tendencies were put to one side and the NUJ platform party told the Times journalists to stand shoulder to shoulder with their print union brothers and not to accept potentially open-ended contractual obligations at Wapping. ‘You are Times journalists,’ Greg Neale pointed out, ‘and not even Murdoch, even in this political climate, could get support if he’d just sacked the entire Times staff.’[3]

In fact, many Times staff were energized by the news that Murdoch was poised to free the paper from the print unions’ grip, perhaps making it sustainably profitable for the first time in their working lives. Disobeying the NUJ edict, they had already started drifting over to the new Times office behind the wire at Wapping to help get the Monday edition ready. Bill Bryson, still subediting the business news pages, was sorry for the many blameless individuals who had suddenly lost their jobs but he could not help basking ‘in the glow of a single joyous thought’ that he would no longer be involved in the nightly demarcation battle with lazy and violent SOGAT wire-room operators. Other subeditors welcomed the opportunity to be freed from similar battles of will. An NGA compositor had once spat at Peter Brown for indicating where he wanted a minor copy alteration. Brown felt the print unions had squandered the sympathy that would normally have been due them. What was more, given the rumours that Murdoch had a reserve army of Australians waiting to write The Times if its staff went on strike, Brown wanted to know what the NUJ’s fall-back strategy was if the paper could be brought out without its official staff. To this, there was no convincing answer.[4]

Ranged against the Wapping advocates were colleagues with a variety of grievances. For a few, union solidarity was an important consideration. Harry Conroy threatened to bring NUJ disciplinary action against any member who went to Wapping. But, as speeches from the floor made clear, the principal issue was outrage at the appalling way in which Times staff had been treated and taken for granted by their management. Employed to unearth facts and reveal truth, their professional pride had been dented by their inability to detect what their own management had been plotting under their very noses. Indeed, the failure of any journalist in any section of the British media to predict accurately the scale of Murdoch’s coup stood as an indictment. Many felt duped. There was also a more selfish angle. Neale’s claim that Murdoch could not produce the paper without its journalists had resonance. Some believed that the proprietor’s moment of crisis was their moment of opportunity. Given how much Murdoch needed them to support the greatest gamble of his life, why should they meekly assent to do his bidding without pushing for a better offer? If threatened, he might make all manner of worthwhile concessions.

From the outside, not all commentators had sympathy with journalists’ wounded pride and sense of self-worth. Paul Johnson, the Spectator’s media correspondent, was scathing, lecturing that ‘Civilization is not merely created and advanced by individuals; it is promoted and above all upheld by institutions.’ Now was not the moment to risk a great paper’s future, especially since many of those demanding a show of loyalty from management had not even shown it towards the former mild-mannered Thomson ownership.[5] This was not a sentiment much aired during the hours of debate at the hotel ballroom. Those who had always disliked what they saw as Murdoch’s casual attitude to the disposability of his staff believed he had to be taught a lesson. Some argued that his demands were illegal. To find out if this could be true, they summoned the labour lawyer (and future Lord Chancellor) Derry Irvine. Corralled in an upstairs bedroom in the hotel, he gave his opinion that there were no grounds to sue News International for issuing an ultimatum to move to Wapping although there might be an opportunity to claim for unfair dismissal if anyone was sacked. This advice was not as positive as many had hoped. The speechifying continued until midnight by which time the meeting had been in session for ten hours. A motion was passed (by fifty-nine votes to fifty-eight) which, although supporting the principle of going to Wapping (subject to negotiating better terms and conditions), deferred final judgment until a further meeting on Sunday. The opponents would need only one Wapping supporter to switch sides in order to derail The Times’s move.[6]

The key event had already taken place that night. The first pickets – up to two hundred – had assembled outside the Wapping plant, but, inside, the Sunday newspapers had been produced. Surrounded by his senior executives, Murdoch had pressed the button that started the presses rolling at 8 p.m. There was clapping and cheering. Few had ever seen the proprietor in such buoyant mood. Then he turned away from his entourage to make a telephone call. The recipient was Bert Hardy, now at Associated Newspapers and the man whose idea building the Wapping plant had been in the first place and whom Murdoch had subsequently sacked. ‘We’ve done it,’ Murdoch hollered down the receiver, ‘and I’d just like to thank you.’ Little more than an hour later, the first editions were leaving the plant. That night three million copies of the News of the World (plus 750,000 printed in Glasgow) and 1.2 million of the Sunday Times were printed. The former was two million down on Bouverie Street’s production run while the latter had a shortfall of around 150,000. But it was good enough. Management collectively sighed with relief.[7] Britain awoke on the Sunday morning to a new dawn in the country’s journalism. It happened to be Australia Day.

This was the sobering reality confronting ‘refuseniks’ as they made there way to the Marlborough Crest Hotel for the conclusion of the NUJ vote. It was a bitter affair. Angela Gordon, the Times Diary editor, called for those who had gone to Wapping that morning in order to bring the paper out ahead of the chapel’s vote to resign their union membership. Telexes came in from Charles Wilson accepting the demands made in the previous night’s motion. Making the obvious deductions, Don McIntyre argued that only by standing firm would a better deal be offered. Greg Neale implored the meeting to vote ‘no’. But a show of hands indicated a three to one vote in favour of going to Wapping. By the time the platform party announced the result and Neale his own resignation as chapel father, the first edition of The Times, written and produced from Wapping, was already hitting the streets without them.[8] Several long-serving journalists were in tears.

Bringing that first Wapping edition of the paper out with only a skeleton staff defying the NUJ chapel directive not to do so was an especially difficult task. As Charles Wilson put it, it was ‘a bit like parachute jumping or the art of seduction. You had better get it right first time because you might never get another chance.’[9] For the past three months the paper’s production editor, Tony Norbury, had been working round the clock to get it right. He had spent the last few weeks with a folding camp bed by his side, snatching a few hours sleep each night in between longer and longer shifts. For the final stretch, Murdoch had been helping out as Norbury’s general handyman, subbing work, forwarding copy, running errands, issuing instructions, encouragements and occasional oaths. When the moment of truth arrived, as with the Sunday Times the evening before, there was a tremendous sense of expectation. Again, the management and production staff encircled Murdoch and started clapping as he pressed the button that started the first edition of The Times from Wapping. There was a sound of revving, then of whirling. The presses started to roll. As they did so, the platform party turned to Tony Norbury and gave him a no less deserved round of applause. Sixty-six per cent of the Times print run was completed on the first night and much of it left the plant late, ensuring delayed distribution that left large areas of Britain without the paper on the newsstand by the crucial morning rush hour. But it was good enough to ensure subsequent performances and it was 66 per cent more than the print unions had boasted would come out.

Tim Austin was among the coterie of Times journalists who had gone to help bring out the first edition from Wapping while his colleagues were still debating whether to join him. When he had finished subbing it, he formed part of a small group who went off to watch the departure of the first edition at about 9 p.m. He recalled the moment of the great breakout:

We stood behind the fence and watched the trucks lining up behind the gate, revving. There were hordes of baying pickets. The noise was fantastic. A huge police presence. The whole of the area was floodlit. Cries of ‘Scabs! Scabs! Bastards!’ The police were confident their line would hold for the trucks to get out. You could see the driver in the first lorry. He had obviously psyched himself up. The potential for him being damaged severely was pretty clear. They opened the gates and he just put his foot down. I’ve never seen a lorry accelerate so quickly. By the time he got to the gatehouse he must have been doing thirty miles an hour. If he was going to kill somebody, too bad. He wanted to get out.[10]

II

On Monday morning, the journalists turned up at their new home. The barbed wire and security measures were the first shock. The Times’s new office was the second. Allegedly, French Napoleonic prisoners of war had constructed the building as a rum warehouse in 1805. Its former use fleetingly gave heart to those journalists who had not yet discovered that Wapping was to be a ‘dry’ work environment; others were filled with foreboding at the thought that their office had supposedly been built by forced labour. From the outside it resembled nothing more inspiring than a long, brick, single-storey tram shed, complete with a corrugated-iron roof. A concrete ramp ascending towards a door wide enough to take a stately wheelchair proclaimed the entrance that had been designed for Charles Douglas-Home. Those venturing inside found the interior brightly lit. It needed to be because, with few windows, there was minimal natural light. Older journalists eyed the computer terminals with apprehension. Monitors were switched on; cursors were blinking. It looked complicated. They had never touched such technology before and doubted whether they could master it now. Indeed, some did not like the idea of typing in their own work directly – as if doing so downgraded them from the status of literati to artisan. Standing on the backbench, Charles Wilson harangued the sceptics: ‘Don’t be so wet. Some of you will learn the new technology in three weeks. Most of you will take three months. And you, Philip Howard, will take three years!’ All eyes swivelled towards the distinguished literary editor. Within days of Wilson’s exposition on the benefits of the new technology, he noticed that Angela Gordon had brought in her portable typewriter and had set it down neatly on her desk between two discarded computer screens. Leading by example, Wilson stormed over, picked up the offending typewriter, walked over to the entrance to the Gents’ lavatory and installed it there as a doorstop. The incident got elaborated with the telling and rival newsrooms were soon agog with the story that The Times was being run by a rampaging, half-crazed Glaswegian who, when not throwing typewriters at his staff, was hurling them down lavatories.[11]

The first few days proved uncomfortable. There were not enough computer terminals installed and the largely computer-illiterate journalists found themselves having to share. A fortnight passed before there were enough terminals to go round, by which time the possessive instincts displayed by some towards what was supposedly communal property had become apparent. It was not just the older generation who appeared bamboozled by the technology. ‘I had never before learnt even to touch-type (for I had dictated leaders to my secretary, Val Smith, pacing round the desk for what I thought was rhetorical impact),’ recalled Peter Stothard, ‘and I was not alone. One of our finest “production journalists” found it hard even to operate the teach-yourself cassette tape, let alone the Atex computers.’[12]

The breakdown of trust between management and journalists took even longer to repair. The situation was not as bad at The Times as it was at the Sunday Times, where members voted to go to Wapping by only sixty-eight votes to sixty, but many felt the editor’s office was now enemy territory. The refuseniks obeyed the NUJ stricture not to work at Wapping by continuing to regard Gray’s Inn Road as their place of work and refusing to pass the picket line or file copy to the new location. As they well knew, they were courting the sack. Greg Neale’s successor as The Times’s NUJ chapel father, Clifford Longley, conceded the irony that ‘had our agreement been legally binding – an idea alien to our union but favoured by Murdoch – we could have stopped him in his tracks’.[13] Most, reluctantly, accepted their fate and of all News International’s seven hundred journalists, only thirty-eight refused to cross the Wapping picket line. But many of the remaining refuseniks were important figures in the life and work of The Times. Among them was Pat Healy who had been with the paper for twenty years, Paul Routledge, who had spent almost seventeen years at The Times, mostly as labour correspondent (and in the previous six months in Singapore as the paper’s South East Asia correspondent), Greg Neale, Donald McIntyre, David Felton and Barry Clement. They were joined by Martin Huckerby, the assistant foreign editor, with almost fifteen years Gray’s Inn Road experience, whom Wilson sacked for writing a hostile article about Wapping in the UK Press Gazette.[14] Ten Times journalists resigned or were dismissed for refusing to go to Wapping from the first,[15] although others were to join the exodus to find friendlier work environments over the following months.

After the difficulties encountered on the first night, the production run of The Times improved remarkably. By Thursday 30 January (day four from Wapping), the paper reached its full production target (518,800 copies) for the first time. The belief that News International would be lost without the print unions was shown up as amazing complacency. Indeed, the basic statistics immediately demonstrated the extent to which the company had been subjected over the years to a print unions’ racket. In the old press rooms of Bouverie Street and Gray’s Inn Road, it had taken more than two thousand men (there were almost no women) to produce News International’s four national newspapers. At Wapping, it was now taking just 670 to do the same task. Despite being of the same vintage as those at the old sites, Wapping’s Goss press machines, working at two-thirds capacity, were each churning out forty thousand newspapers an hour with a fraction of the paper breaks that had halted business so frequently and so suspiciously in the past. Reaching production targets despite having fewer machines to work from, management discovered what they had long suspected but had never been allowed close enough to prove – that the print unions at Gray’s Inn Road had been running their presses at far below their capacity. Wapping’s productivity was impressive. Nine hundred reels of newsprint were consumed daily, each reel containing around five miles of paper and one press consuming a reel every fifteen minutes. Seventy tonnes of ink were used every week. In the publishing room, 132 employees were now doing what had previously taken nearly 1800 print union members to achieve.[16]

It was little wonder that Murdoch was being observed around the site in trainers and jumper ‘looking frightfully bouncy and positive about the whole thing’.[17] ‘Everybody has been wonderful!’ he gushed, in a thank-you message to his staff.[18] The Times letters’ page soon filled with correspondence. A few expressed disgust at the ‘Thatcherite’ agenda of the paper and the actions of its proprietor but most were supportive. There were plaudits from the past, among them from Sir William Rees-Mogg who wrote a letter for publication reflecting on the trouble he had had when editor with the unions. He commended Murdoch’s ‘courage to break out of this intolerable and corrupting monopoly’. He was not alone. Sir Denis Hamilton later ranked Murdoch’s switch to Wapping ‘one of the great newspaper achievements of the century’. One Times columnist who felt particularly joyful was Bernard Levin, who promptly penned an article – ‘Fleet Street – now the truth can be told’ – that catalogued what he saw as the horrors of print union power against which ‘any attempt to let the outside world know what was happening nightly would have led to an immediate strike’. There was also praise from what were normally assumed to be hostile quarters. Harold Evans was asked to join a television debate on Wapping. The offer was quickly rescinded when he revealed he would commend Murdoch on his brave and necessary action. In the Spectator, Auberon Waugh opined that the so-called ‘Dirty Digger’ should be offered ‘a dukedom at very least’.[19] For his part, Murdoch appeared to be enjoying the fray. Asked on BBC 1 whether he would move back to Bouverie Street or Gray’s Inn Road, he replied, ‘Of course I won’t move back. I feel like a man who has been on a life sentence and has just been released. I feel a wonderful sense of freedom.’[20]

His journalists, meanwhile, were not enjoying the same spirit of ecstasy. With each day that passed, the angry crowds of pickets at the gates grew larger. Staff had to telephone a special number each morning to find where the re-enforced buses, complete with grilles and drawn curtains, would pick them up to take them through the gates into the compound. Rendezvousing with buses at ever-changing locations was not suitable for everyone but those who persisted with taking their cars into work were confronted at the gates with pickets slapping sticky labels that, when removed, took the paintwork with them.

It was dispiriting for journalists to run the gauntlet of taunts from those they did not know. But to experience abuse from former friends and colleagues was particularly unpleasant. Former secretaries taunted those they had previously worked for. Indeed, former secretaries taunted remaining secretaries who crossed the picket line. Pat Healy joined the far side of the barricades. Paul Routledge, back from his posting in Singapore, also joined the demonstration in order to give vent to his feelings, although his former colleagues were more unsettled by the presence of Mrs Routledge whose line of invective, although blunter, was more penetrating. Some journalists tried to deflect the verbal taunts. When one picket snarled ‘sc-aaaaa-b’ at Alan Hamilton, the seasoned reporter asked him to elaborate. ‘You’re a traitor to the working class,’ the picket alleged. ‘No, I’m not,’ replied Hamilton, ‘I’m from Edinburgh.’ The picket opted to call him an unprintable part of the female anatomy instead.[21] Like many others, Tim Austin faced a daily taunt of ‘I hope your kids die of cancer’ as he passed the pickets. The volley of abuse was not confined to the factory gates. Brian Forbes of the picture desk had excrement thrown in his garden and bricks through his window. Doubtless such behaviour was cathartic for those trying to cope with the loss of their jobs but it was also intended to make the lives of Wapping employees such a misery that they would leave the company. The speed with which elements within the anti-Wapping campaign decided to launch intimidation tactics alarmed those who were on the receiving end. The thuggery took a particularly sinister path on 20 February when two men interrupted Christopher Warman, a respected and long-serving Times correspondent, as he was enjoying a drink with Don McIntyre and friends near the old Gray’s Inn Road offices. Hassled as to whether he worked at Wapping, he conceded that he did. He was then head-butted and a beer glass was smashed into his face, narrowly missing his jugular vein. The assailants ran away leaving him on the floor, covered in blood.[22] It was a frightening moment. He required nine stitches to his neck and face. Yet, as soon as he was out of hospital, he made a point of reporting for work. As the paper’s property correspondent, he promptly filed copy on Wapping’s new desirable converted warehouse residences. Although Warman conducted himself with extraordinary sang-froid, many of his colleagues were shaken by the incident and wondered when their own time would come.

Murdoch, Bruce Matthews, Bill O’Neill and the four News International editors were given round-the-clock protection by bodyguards from a security firm of ex-Royal Marines. Others found the level of security a mixed blessing. Used to filing his column from home, Miles Kington had always given his copy to his near neighbour, Philip Howard, to take into the office. But Howard’s lit. ed. office was temporarily still in Gray’s Inn Road. Undaunted, Kington trekked to Wapping to deliver his copy personally only to be turned away at the security gate for not having a pass. For hours, he tried to contact staff he knew behind the wire, but all telephones were recording ‘out to lunch’ messages (somewhat improbably, since there was nowhere for miles around serving a decent meal). Eventually, Kington whipped up the courage to ask to be put through to the editor. ‘Sorry sir,’ the security officer at the gate replied, ‘I haven’t got the number.’[23]

Someone who did need better protection was the EETPU’s leader, Eric Hammond. Attending a meeting of the TUC General Council, he was jostled by three hundred abusive protestors outside and, upon reaching the supposed sanctuary of the Congress House foyer, was kicked and punched by several union officials. Verbally, the mugging continued upstairs. Yet, although the General Council voted overwhelmingly to start proceedings for the EETPU’s suspension from the TUC, calmer heads argued for caution in expelling the electricians for fear they would start a rival TUC that would attract those working in the new technologies, leaving the TUC with a membership confined to the shrinking heavy industries. Hammond’s position was also strengthened by what he subsequently described as a ‘trump card’ – News International’s threat to sue if the TUC instructed his members to stop work at Wapping against a company with which they were not in dispute.[24] Instead the TUC reached a compromise whereby the EETPU members would not be ordered to stop work at Wapping on the condition their union did not assist in further recruitment there or enter into a formal agreement unless it involved the other print unions too. Hammond accepted this, although he was half-minded to encourage the TUC to demand downing tools at Wapping so that he could have sued his fellow union brothers and ‘been free of all their directives.’[25]

When the Labour Party’s National Executive (the NEC) met on 29 January they called on ‘all Labour Party bodies, Labour local authorities, members and supporters to boycott The Times’ and the other News International titles. Labour’s director of communications, Peter Mandelson, then asked Times and Sun journalists attending the press conference to leave Labour Party premises immediately. Lobby rules prevented a paper from being specifically blacklisted, so Neil Kinnock called off his weekly briefing with the parliamentary lobby journalists and instituted private meetings with each of the non-News International representatives instead. The Daily Mail and the Yorkshire Post refused to play this game, a stance subsequently taken up by other papers, thereby denying the Labour Party its chance to influence the press.

The Labour Party boycott quickly descended in farce. Nick Raynsford, the party’s by-election candidate in Fulham, found it counter-productive and Larry Whitty, Labour’s general secretary, had to be dispatched to ask the print union’s permission for the purdah to be temporary lifted. Permission was granted, so long as the press conferences did not stray from the strict issue of the by-election. Three Labour MPs threatened to boycott the House of Commons Environment Committee’s visit to York unless the presentation on historic buildings by Dr Norman Hammond of the York Archaeological Trust was cancelled. Dr Hammond’s crime was to be The Times’s archaeological correspondent. Meekly, the Committee agreed. But Labour’s boycott did not catch on behind the Iron Curtain. When George Robertson, a Labour foreign affairs spokesman (and future NATO Secretary-General), attended a Communist-organized conference in his NEC capacity, he awoke each morning in his East Berlin hotel to the choice of the Morning Star or The Times.

The boycott campaign made little appreciable impact on sales. By the third week, Wilson was trumpeting Times daily sales of 485,000 copies, an increase of 13,000 since moving from Gray’s Inn Road.[26] Sales of the Sun were also marginally up. But by ensuring that no Labour source was prepared to speak to or write for The Times it hit at the paper’s ability to report comprehensively. Labour MPs like Jack Straw who had written regularly for the paper had to cease doing so. That many of the paper’s refuseniks were left-leaning also harmed its breadth. Particularly grievous was the loss of the paper’s labour relations staff. On the night The Times chapel had debated whether to go to Wapping, Harry Conroy had leaned closer to Don McIntyre and made clear, in broad Glaswegian, that the labour staff would be treated as scabs for the rest of their lives and would never get work elsewhere if they were minded to stay on at The Times. Having fully digested this point, the labour correspondent joined the refuseniks.[27] It was easy to see their predicament. The Labour Movement’s refusal to cooperate with News International employees (the NUJ even instructed its members at other newspapers not to supply information to any News International journalist) would have made their task extremely difficult even if they had stayed. But their absence, and the difficulty created in trying to cover labour relations in general and Wapping objectively from the new location was shown up at a time when the Guardian was able to field Patrick Wintour and the Financial Times Raymond Snoddy. Matters were made worse when an article that was partly critical of Murdoch written by the highly regarded centre-left columnist Peter Kellner was spiked. Kellner, the New Statesman’s political editor, had been writing a fortnightly column for The Times and the decision not to run his piece ensured his resignation, compounding the paper’s drain of alternative voices. As some were quick to point out, the episode smacked of crude censorship and reflected poorly on The Times’s objectivity.[28]

Yet, such defensiveness was mild compared to the attempt to gag The Times. At least thirty-three Labour-controlled local authorities withdrew job advertising from the paper and its siblings. Their decision had a proportionately much more serious effect on the Times Educational Supplement, which was the market leader (by a considerable margin) for advertising education vacancies. As such, the boycott must have been counter-productive to those authorities with teaching vacancies to fill. Undaunted, its advocates also intended to sweep staff common rooms and school libraries of the offending literature. The Labour group controlling the Inner London Educational Authority (ILEA) wrote to school and college governors instructing them to table resolutions to cancel Times, Times Literary Supplement and Times Educational Supplement subscriptions at their institutions of learning.[29]

Whether such activity was in the interests of the teaching profession was open to debate, but the prohibition of The Times from public libraries was altogether more serious and illegal. Across the country, Labour-controlled local authorities had interpreted their party’s boycott of News International to include preventing public library users consulting The Times. The socalled paper of record was removed from public scrutiny in more than thirty local authority areas. Such action was in breach of the 1964 Libraries Act. In some cases, the consequences descended into absurdity. When a barrister, John Riley, went to his public library in Staffordshire, the staff told him they had The Times behind the counter but were instructed not to let him look at it. He threatened legal action.

Richard Luce, the Arts Minister, wrote to fifteen councils drawing attention to the illegality of their action. Three responded positively but the rest, including Bradford, Sheffield and a succession of famously left wing London boroughs, refused. Salford did not get round to replying.[30] When Luce failed to take the matter further, News International called upon the advocacy of Anthony Lester QC and David Pannick and took the local authorities to court. The eventual judgment was damning: ‘There could hardly be a clearer manifestation of an abuse of power,’ Lord Justice Watkins pronounced, than ‘to see such irresponsible behaviour’ by elected representatives knowingly ignoring the law.[31] This brought the councils into line, with the exception of the London Borough of Brent which continued to refuse to stock The Times in its libraries. The council cited a succession of increasingly bizarre defences for why the court’s ruling did not apply to it. At one stage, the argument was proposed that the ‘racist and sexist’ material contained within the paper would conflict with the council’s duties under the Race Relations Act. In contrast, the Communist Morning Star remained freely available for consultation. It was not until March 1987 that the council finally bowed to the judgment of the High Court, leading Anthony Lester to declare ‘at the thirteenth hour the white flag has been hoisted alongside the red flag, over Brent Town Hall’.[32]

Quietly, the Government was delighted by Murdoch’s decision to sack his print union workers although Kenneth Clarke, the Employment Minister, broke cover to say he thought the press baron’s personal public relations required ‘a great deal of continuing attention. He is not an instantly popular figure.’ With John Biffen, the Leader of the Commons, seeking to defer a full-scale debate and the Speaker ruling out Tony Benn’s attempt to get an emergency debate, left wing Labour MPs were reduced to demanding that the Home Secretary declare Murdoch an ‘undesirable alien’ who should be banned from Britain ‘in the interest of decency and public order’. For his part, Neil Kinnock told a print workers’ rally at Wembley that the next Labour Government would curb the monopolistic power of the main newspaper owners and began referring to ‘Stalag Wapping’ and ‘Schloss Murdoch’. He rejected an invitation to discuss the situation with News International management.[33] The rhetoric of the Labour leader during the dispute frequently gave the impression he saw it as a fight to resist foreign influence. Not content to lambast Murdoch’s ‘intercontinental ballistic management’ and conjure up Teutonic images, the future Vice-President of the European Commission maintained that when it came to the concentration of media ownership, the rule should be ‘if you’re not British – clear out’.[34]

III

One aspect of the Wapping strategy that worked particularly effectively was the switch from rail to road distribution. Using lorries gave The Times much greater flexibility in delaying deadlines if late news or a technical glitch needed to be accommodated. Unlike the railways, road freight could wait. It was flexible. It also ensured that there was just one loading period. Forty-foot lorries could drive up the ramp into the loading bay, take the papers on board and be on their way. Previously, the papers had first to be loaded onto vans and unloaded at the station before being reloaded onto trains, offloaded onto vans at the other end and taken to the wholesale depots before being transported to the shops for sale. The decision had been taken to stick with delivering to the existing wholesalers in the provinces but in London TNT handled all aspects of the distribution right down to delivering to the newsagents’ front doors. Brenda Dean had hoped that even if the papers were successfully printed at Wapping her instruction to regional SOGAT members to refuse to handle them would cripple distribution. But the attitude of SOGAT workers in the provinces towards their London brothers was made apparent when only wholesale distributors in Liverpool, Coventry and Glasgow obeyed the executive order to black the titles. WH Smith and John Menzies management made clear that employees refusing to handle the papers would be sacked. Such was the apathy of provincial members towards the Wapping strikers that SOGAT members in Watford even continued to produce the Sunday Times Colour Magazine. One SOGAT victory proved to be Pyrrhic: refusing to print 1.5 million extra News of the World copies done under contract with Express Newspapers in Manchester ensured that the contract was duly cancelled and jobs were lost. Wapping met the extra print run instead. The unions had badly underestimated the new plant’s ability to meet demand.

With the attempt to black distribution in Britain failing, SOGAT tried to broaden the theatres of war by persuading unions at foreign mills to go on strike rather than supply Wapping with newsprint. One firm had the contract for 75 per cent of News International’s purchase and Wapping would thus have nothing to print its journalism on if foreign unions adhered to the boycott. But workers of the world did not unite on this occasion; they proved unwilling to risk unemployment for the sake of a British labour dispute. SOGAT had to make do with messages of support.[35]

By creating a legally separate entity to handle distribution, News International’s lawyer, Geoffrey Richards, had ensured any blacking campaign would be deemed illegal secondary action.[36] Brenda Dean knew that this would be the case and consequently did not bother to hold ballots prior to issuing her order to black the titles. Consequently, the company began recourse to the law. By nightfall on 29 January, High Court injunctions had been placed not only on SOGAT’s blacking tactics but also on the TGWU’s attempts to order members driving the TNT lorries not to cross the Wapping picket line. Dean remained defiant in the face of the injunction, telling a three-hundred-strong rally in Manchester, her home base, on 31 January: ‘If you walk away from your colleagues dismissed in London and their families, you don’t deserve to be called trade unionists.’ ‘Scab newspapers’ should be blacked she told the crowd, adding, ‘If you don’t support your own kind, no one will support you when you need it.’[37] It was not surprising she was desperate to strike a quick and overwhelming blow. As she later confided, the siege of Wapping ‘was winnable – or losable – in those first two weeks’.[38] The longer the period in which distribution was not seriously disrupted the more certain would be News International’s eventual victory.

On 8 February, three thousand dismissed print workers and activists gathered outside Wapping in a show of strength. Keen to stress the repercussions on the families of those who had lost their jobs, Brenda Dean led a ‘Women’s March’. Advancing in candlelit formation in the manner of a column of medieval pilgrims, the women adapted the drunken sailor refrain to ‘What shall we do with Rupert Murdoch, early in the morning? Burn, burn, burn the bastard …’[39] But for all the protesters’ anger, the lorries got through. Two days later, the High Court fined SOGAT £25,000 for contempt of court for failing to obey the injunction prohibiting the ‘blacking’ from the wholesalers. What was more, the union’s £17 million assets were sequestrated until it renounced the ‘blacking’ instruction.

Having stayed silent on the dispute during its first three weeks, The Times’s leader column finally chose the sequestration issue to address the news on its doorstep. ‘When the obstacles between the paper and its readers include darts, drill bits and blackened golf balls as well as illegal attempts to threaten customers and suppliers it should surprise no one that the force of law is our first defence,’ it declared.[40] Such sentiments left opponents cold. Proud trade unionists continued to demand defiance. Ron Todd of the TGWU pointed out ‘if the Tolpuddle Martyrs had taken legal advice, they could have saved themselves a trip to Australia’ while Brenda Dean stated ‘our members are more important than money’.[41] In fact, many members were far from in agreement with her on this point: the campaign on behalf of the 4500 ex-News International employees was preventing the union’s 213,000 other members from receiving their pensions, injury claims and other benefits provided from its central funds. This became a source of friction.

It was not just SOGAT that refused to retract in front of injunctions and fines. The NGA, which had also been fined for contempt of court, failed to win the support of members in a ballot to black production of the Times supplements (the TLS, TES and THES) printed in Northampton. Regardless of this rebuff, the union’s leadership announced it would black the papers anyway since five NGA members involved in putting the supplements’ pages to camera had voted (in a supposedly secret ballot) to strike. Fortunately the ability of five men to disrupt the entire supplements division was overcome when their employer (working under contract to News International) moved them to a less strategic department. Nonetheless, Tony Dubbins proudly boasted that his union’s initials stood for ‘Not Going Away’.[42]

News International hoped that the freezing of union funds would lead to a hasty settlement and the calling off not only of the blacking call but also the picketing of the Wapping plant. Union activists believed the court action demonstrated the need to intensify efforts while there was time. Three thousand pickets (many of them Kent miners) descended on Wapping on the night of 13 February intent on stopping The Times and Sun from leaving the gates. Five hundred police, including mounted officers, had to be rushed in to keep the exits clear. There were forty-one arrests on that night alone. A month later, tempers were strained further when two pickets were hit and their legs broken by a lorry they were trying to prevent leaving the plant. To misfortune was added bathos: the lorry was carrying copies of the Sun’s ‘Freddie Starr ate my hamster’ edition. Three nights later, the pickets sought to exact their revenge: seven thousand besieged the plant. Iron bars, lead piping, shotgun cartridges and railing spikes were seized by the police from the rioters, who succeeded in tearing down a forty-yard section of the security fence. Fortress Wapping appeared to be on the verge of being overrun and, in scenes worthy of Sergei Eisenstein, it took mounted-police charges to push the surging demonstrators back. The assault managed seriously to delay, but not to prevent, the lorries getting out.

Most evenings passed with incident, but a pattern was emerging in which Saturday nights involved the most serious breakdowns in order with demonstrators attempting to prevent Murdoch’s lucrative Sunday titles from leaving the compound. As weeks passed without the prospect of resolution, the siege became a cause célèbre, attracting the attention of left-wing activists, students, trade unionists and, increasingly, thugs looking for a bit of violent excitement. Banners were held high proclaiming Class War, the Socialist Workers’ Party and the various Trotskyite factions. The Wapping Highway became a major sales venue for the cottage industry of left-wing newspapers. Only the lonely seller of Labour Weekly was made to feel unwelcome. By the end of the third month of the siege, there had been 474 arrests. Among this number was the NGA’s general secretary, Tony Dubbins, who was charged with obstructing lorries. But of the total number of arrests, it was telling that less than a third were ex-printers.

Moderate voices within the unions were concerned at the hijacking of the printers’ cause by those with their own, sometimes violent, agenda. Yet, having determined upon a tactic that centred upon trying to block the entry and exit points of Wapping, the logic was to welcome as many able-bodied protestors as possible. Weight of numbers was the only prospect of the siege working. After all, the unions’ other strategies – getting the wholesalers to black distribution, encouraging readers not to buy the newspapers and persuading the contract printers Bemrose and Odhams not to produce the colour supplements, had all failed. Indeed, when balloted for strike action, the SOGAT employees at Bemrose voted twelve to one against coming out and those at Odhams also rejected their union’s call by an overwhelming margin.[43] Violence was ‘certainly not what we are after,’ announced Chris Robbins, SOGAT’s London district secretary, although he added:

if there are 8,000 people outside Wapping there is little that the police can do. We have shown [on 16 March, when the Sunday titles were delayed by four hours] that is a sufficient number to stop the papers going out. Unlike Orgreave [a reference to one of the bitterest confrontations of the miners’ strike] the exits are all in a pretty enclosed area.[44]

The intention was clear. But inside the stockade, plans had been devised to outsmart the siege. News International’s strategy would not have been possible without the active support of the police (a point that particularly riled those activists who believed the Met was being used politically). Police sealed a one-mile area around the plant. There were three permanent roadblocks, augmented where necessary by up to sixteen temporary roadblocks. Because lorries leaving in ones or twos could be picked off, they lined up en masse behind the walls, ready for a group breakout. Two o’clock in the morning was the usual time for one of the sets of gates to open and the lorries to speed their way through the defences, followed by shouts, threats and projectiles. From there, there was more than one route that could be taken and, unlike the drivers and the police, the demonstrators never knew in advance which it would be, ensuring that they had to stretch their troops thinly across the whole area. But on nights where the unions were able to deploy mass numbers it often took mounted-police charges to clear a way through. It was not only the lorry drivers who found themselves running the gauntlet in this fashion. Those journalists and staff who could not get out before the demonstrators started gathering at 7 p.m. were often forced to stay within the compound until 2 a.m. as well. Hours were wasted sitting in cars with the headlights off and engine running, lined up in convoy formation awaiting the command to put the foot down and accelerate fast.

There was an obvious downside to this level of security. The more Wapping’s fortifications were piled high, the less agreeable it appeared to journalists and public alike. The Sunday Express cartoonist, Giles, depicted it as a concentration camp complete with goose-stepping Nazi guards. The police did not allow any buses or taxis through the one-mile cordon. Residents could pass through only on production of identity cards proving they lived there. They could be forgiven for wishing the plant could be shut down so that they could get a decent night’s sleep. Tower Hamlets Council had been inundated with complaints about the night-time noise generated and some hoped this could be used as a pretext for having the police operation scaled back or even the plant forcibly shut. When a journalist from New Society, a weekly magazine later subsumed into the New Statesman, drove over to Wapping to talk to some of those who had lodged complaints, some pickets came within view. He gave them a sympathetic gesture of solidarity. Unfortunately it was misinterpreted and a brick came smashing through his car window.

IV

The nightly scuffles preoccupied those caught on both sides of the stockade, but it was only one part of a wider battle for public opinion. In this respect, Brenda Dean presented a more appealing face than either Murdoch’s barbed wire or the traditional overweight Bolshie shop steward to which Fleet Street had long played host. Soft-spoken and moderate in tone, Dean led the presentation of the unions’ case to the media. She was adept at steering the rhetoric away from overpaid (usually NGA) print men trying to maintain Luddite practices and onto the fate of the lower-paid cleaning and clerical workers, often women, who were more obviously blameless victims in the battle of Wapping. Much was made of the suffering inflicted upon their families. By May, SOGAT had spent £250,000 on the boycott campaign. Indeed, the unions spent an estimated total of £400,000 on publicity during the long course of the siege.[45] Newspaper advertisements were placed, three million stickers produced and six million leaflets printed. The ‘Don’t Buy …’ logo was embossed on posters, plastic bags and T-shirts. When the time of year came round there was even a not especially festive Christmas card proclaiming ‘Christmas Greetings – Please don’t buy The Sun, News of the World, The Times, Sunday Times’ between four pieces of stylized holly. There was also an advert featuring a photograph of a child clutching her teddy bear beside the caption: ‘My dad helped Mr Murdoch make millions. Now he wants to put him on the Dole. Don’t let him.’ This was not all. A pro-strikers’ newspaper, the Wapping Post, was launched. Edited by Chris Robbins and running to twelve pages, it was promoted by the unions who placed bulk orders with 45,000 copies being distributed throughout the country. It provided a lively mix of articles on ‘Mugger Murdoch’, police brutality, the health and safety dangers of operating computers, letters and details of forthcoming events with such titles as ‘The Truth Behind Barbed Wire’ addressed by the likes of the ubiquitous Tony Benn.[46]

How much effect the campaign had in winning over the public was doubtful. To those involved on either side, it was a life or death struggle for the future of the industry. Those not involved were less concerned. Confidential market research commissioned by News International when the siege was four months old suggested that many of those polled did not care whose will prevailed. Of those who did, 39 per cent favoured the management and 33 per cent the unions (although union support had a majority among those who felt strongly on the issue). Less than half could remember – without prompting – the name of someone connected with the dispute with only Murdoch and Dean attaining significant recognition. But the data did show that no perceptible switch in readership away from The Times could be discerned and that only 6 per cent thought the unions were winning the dispute.[47]

Within the News International group, only the Sunday Times appeared to be losing circulation in the first three months of the move to Wapping, largely due to distribution problems and, perhaps, the desertion of some of its sizeable non-Thatcherite readership.[48] But The Times had particular cause for celebration. On 28 March it published on Good Friday for the first time since 1918. None of its competitors appeared – their print unions forbade it. To capitalize, a record print run of 773,948 copies were made of the Good Friday Times, a full 120,000 more than the celebrated royal wedding edition in 1981. By May, the paper was averaging 503,000 sales per day, breaking the highest sustained circulation in its history. Taking advantage of the national economic recovery, advertising revenue was up by 25 per cent on the year and classified ads were at their highest level for more than a decade.[49]

The actual paper looked, at first sight, remarkably similar to its Gray’s Inn Road predecessor. Close scrutiny revealed it was produced on a marginally smaller paper size but the quality of the printed page was just as good – or rather bad – as before. This was because the presses were no different. Apart from the departure of some quality journalists, there was little difference in content. Peregrine Worsthorne hoped that by reducing production costs, the Wapping revolution would lead to The Times abandoning its fight for larger circulation in favour of serving its 300,000 ‘top readers’.[50] In fact, the paper’s management had been so preoccupied with the logistics of the switch in production that strategic considerations of this kind had been deferred. But upmarket or downmarket, others were fearful for what Wapping meant for the competition. ‘By saving an estimated £60 million on his annual production costs,’ Peter Paterson warned that Murdoch was ‘in a position to reduce the cover price of, say, The Times, to the destruction of the Telegraph and the Guardian’.[51] Old Fleet Street was swept with panic when it was rumoured Murdoch was poised to drop not only his papers’ cover prices but also their advertising rates.

In truth, to News International’s competitors, Wapping was both a threat and a godsend. Wapping printed four mass-market newspapers, including the leading daily and Sunday tabloid, with a 670-strong production staff. By comparison, the Daily Mail’s owners, Associated Newspapers, were lumbered with a 3400 production staff and the Daily Express’s new owners, United Newspapers, wilted under the weight of a 6800-strong workforce. Clearly, they had to make cuts urgently or risk going under. In the past, such swingeing cuts would have been impossible since the print unions would have gone on indefinite strike, forcing management to back down or compromise. But Wapping provided Murdoch’s rivals with just the weapon – or threat of using such a weapon – that they needed. Once it became clear to the unions they were losing the siege of Wapping, they either had to bow to the other proprietors’ demands or risk being shut out entirely à la Wapping by them too. The Express’s owner, Lord Stevens, lost no time in drawing this conclusion. He discovered that Wapping had concentrated union minds wonderfully and 2500 redundancies were soon agreed. Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail, had already announced his intention to build a new print works in Docklands but he well understood that Murdoch’s coup transformed the scale and urgency with which he had to act. ‘Wapping is a watershed – a great historic date in Fleet Street,’ Rothermere conceded; ‘those who survive are going to be those who have understood this fastest.’[52] Indeed, after years of timid inertia, the speed with which the various proprietors shot out of their respective blocks was remarkable, or, as Charles Wilson put it, ‘they were off like rats up a drain’.[53] A week after The Times’s move to Wapping, the Guardian rushed through an announcement that it would move to Docklands, switch from hot metal to computer typesetting and introduce direct-input by 1987. Within days, Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers declared it would do the same by 1988. Then, in July, the Financial Times announced it too would go east and that the ‘paper of business’ would enter the computer age in 1988.

‘One after another, the threatened newspaper groups have been able, with no weapon but a pair of binoculars for seeing the smoke pouring from the roaring chimneys of Castle Wapping, to conclude agreements’ that their unions would never previously have accepted, noted Bernard Levin in his ‘The Way We Live Now’ column. Here was a case in which:

The man who makes a hole in the hedge gets scratched, but those who go through it after him feel no discomfort. It may be that, as Messrs Black, Stevens, Rothermere and the rest go through the hole, they experience a warm glow of gratitude to the man they can see disappearing towards the horizon with brambles sticking out of him all over. If so, I conclude that if they fail to express that gratitude, it can only be because of shyness.[54]

If a little sotto voce, some of the rival proprietors did salute Murdoch’s courage and audacity. One who loudly did not was the Daily Mirror’s owner, Robert Maxwell, who criticized his enemy for ‘not doing things the British way’. The weight of Maxwell’s pronouncement was soon demonstrated when he sacked his Glasgow print workers for refusing to handle a new colour edition, put up barbed wire and guard dogs around the plant and went to court to sequestrate SOGAT’s assets. Labour MPs who had hurled abuse at Murdoch for such behaviour were noticeably silent when Maxwell, a Labour benefactor, trod the same path.

Few rival editors were prepared to be charitable towards Murdoch (an honourable exception being Brian MacArthur at Eddy Shah’s newly launched Today). When News International placed an advertisement stating its case, most newspapers declined to print it. Some, like the Daily Telegraph’s editor, Max Hastings, refused supposedly on the grounds that he did not ‘want to give space to our principal commercial competition’. Others, like the Guardian and the FT, were too scared of their own unions’ reaction to print it and demanded indemnities against consequent legal action. Only the Daily Mail, the Mirror Group and Today agreed to carry it.[55] The Times was furious at the craven nature of rivals who stood to benefit from Wapping’s legacy but were not prepared to print (let alone endorse) an advertisement in its support. ‘There are some in the newspaper industry,’ the leader column stated accusingly, ‘who are still afraid of their unions. This alone ought to speak more than any advertisement in favour of the cause that News International is fighting.’[56]

One head that did not poke far above the parapet was that of Donald Trelford, editor of the Observer. Seven of his subeditors also worked during the week for The Times. NGA print workers threatened to stop production of the Observer unless they were dismissed. Trelford duly did the dirty work. Next, the printers (backed by the paper’s NUJ chapel father) threatened to shut down the paper unless an innocuous review of a book about the Victorian travel writer Augustus Hare was pulled. Its crime was that it had been written by Times columnist and print union scourge, Bernard Levin. Trelford duly pulled the article and, with it, Levin’s contract to review books for the Observer.[57] An editor who fearlessly and famously stood up to a bullying owner, Tiny Rowland, on the question of his paper’s reporting of African politics was prepared to capitulate tamely before a delegation of union representatives.

Intimidation at the offices of the Observer was as nothing compared to that facing those – journalists and printing staff alike – who worked at or collaborated with Wapping. Leaflets were distributed headed ‘Roll of Dishonour’ listing ‘scabs’’ names and – ominously – their home addresses. Even those not on the staff payroll were at risk. Fifty demonstrators smashed through a glass door to get at the history professor John Vincent while he was trying to give a lecture to his students at Bristol University. Vincent was subjected to a barracking because he had written articles in The Times. It was unlikely that many of the protestors had ever been anywhere near the paper’s machine room but worse followed when one hundred demonstrators disrupted Professor Vincent’s lecture for the third week running, some hurling mud at him. Another who experienced the wrath of activist agitprop was the former Times business editor, Hugh Stephenson, who had gone on to become Professor of Journalism at City University in London. Hardly a Murdoch sycophant, Stephenson found himself the target of his students’ wrath and was subjected to a petition condemning him for submitting articles to The Times in breach of the NUJ boycott.[58]

Neither Professors Vincent nor Stephenson endured as lengthy a trial as David Selbourne. A noted academic writer of eclectic sweep, Selbourne had for twenty-two years been a lecturer at Ruskin College, the adult higher education college in Oxford that had links with the trade union movement. When The Times published an article by him on Labour’s Militant Tendency, he found himself condemned for ‘anti-trade union’ thinking by the Ruskin Students’ Union who ordered him to apologize and not to write such articles again. When he refused to bow to this Maoist instruction, a student picket barred entrance to his lectures. If Selbourne imagined the staff would stand up for his academic freedom of thought he was soon disappointed. The acting principal described Selbourne’s Times article as ‘provocative’ and fellow lecturers declared their ‘solidarity’ with the Students’ Union which promptly called for him to be sacked. Although Ruskin was not part of Oxford University it had access to its facilities and the Oxford University Students’ Union also weighed in to condemn the turbulent academic. The Association of University Teachers were not much more helpful. Selbourne stated that he was not a Murdoch supporter but that he would write again for The Times if commissioned to do so. Ruskin College’s Executive Committee censured him and, unable to get any reassurance that it backed his academic freedom, Selbourne resigned his post. So ended a lengthy career there. But his fate did not go unnoticed. In a succession of leader articles, The Times drew attention to his case and the Government announced an independent enquiry under Sir Albert Sloman, the former Essex University vice-chancellor, to investigate Ruskin’s (taxpayer funded) commitment to academic freedom. It called for the college to revise its disciplinary procedures and make its commitment to academic freedom more explicit.[59]

Meanwhile, the National Union of Journalists continued to side with the dismissed printers. The NUJ’s attempts, as The Times leader column put it, ‘to deprive a newspaper of information, and to obstruct the public reading it’, made it as guilty of promoting censorship as those attempting to silence its academic contributors. During April, the NUJ considered what to do about its members working at Wapping.[60] The decision was not as simple as the more militant voices hoped. The desire to punish those who had gone there was balanced by the fear they would tear up their membership cards and provoke a mass exodus. With these considerations in mind, the union’s National Executive voted by thirteen votes to twelve against initiating disciplinary proceedings against all the journalists. Instead, the union would only pick on those it suspected of being particularly culpable or cowardly: it would investigate the actions of the four chapel fathers individually. It also barred The Times journalist Peter Davenport, reporting its proceedings from its annual conference in Sheffield. The conference itself was certainly worthy of coverage: delegates voted to reverse their National Executive’s decision, ensuring proceedings could be initiated against all News International journalists after all. Condolences were also sent to Colonel Gaddafi over the US raid on Tripoli.

V

On 4 April, Murdoch presented the print unions with a free gift. At face value, it was a generous present and – even if mindful of the history lesson of Greeks bearing gifts – the unions could not easily refuse it. But it was an awkward present all the same. The inspiration for it came in a letter published in The Times from a Mr D. P. Forbes of Croydon.[61] Murdoch read it and set about investigating its feasibility. He soon realized it contained the kernel of a brilliant idea that could end the dispute on terms that would deliver him victory by an apparent act of magnanimity to his opponents.

In moving to Wapping, Murdoch no longer had any need for Gray’s Inn Road and its print facilities. But rather than selling the property and its contents to the highest bidder he could instead give it away to a trade union body on the condition they used it to print a Labour-friendly newspaper employing the very printers Murdoch had sacked. In return for gaining this employment and better representation of left-wing views in the popular press, the unions would call off the siege of Wapping. The proposal, it seemed, could only rebound to Murdoch’s credit. If the unions accepted the offer, everyone would be happy. If they rejected the offer, they would be shown up for being intransigent and unwilling to operate the very machinery and manning levels that they were fighting to foist upon News International.

At a meeting with the print unions at the Mayfair Hotel, Bruce Matthews made them the offer. Although they would not be allowed instantly to asset strip it, they were being offered the freehold on a 300,000 square foot building that, on the open market, had a potential value of around £15 million. With it came a two-year contract to print London editions of the Guardian worth £1 million per annum. Also included was ‘about £40 million’ worth of equipment with computerized typesetting technology and sixty Goss Headliner Mark 1 presses (the same as Wapping used). The offer naturally caught the union delegation off guard. Needing time to digest what was suddenly being tendered, they asked for an adjournment. After they returned, Brenda Dean conceded the offer was ‘unusual to say the least’ and asked for more time to consider it. She warned, however, that it ‘did not represent an alternative to jobs and compensation’. The NGA’s leader, Tony Dubbins, was far less equivocal. It was not a solution, he protested, because ‘the company was offering plant and equipment – not employment’.

Dubbins was certain that the offer was a non-starter designed to sidetrack the unions from their principal aim. They were demanding the right to work at Wapping and, if that proved impossible, to win generous redundancy payments for those who had been sacked. They had never asked to run a paper themselves. But the offer put his union colleagues in a quandary. If they immediately rejected it, they stood to look like wreckers. In any case, they were short of a convincing fallback position. Their attempts to blockade Wapping were failing and, in becoming increasingly violent, were highly risky. Dean’s initial fear was that the offer was not as good as it sounded and that Murdoch was trying to ‘stage-manage’ a deal by appearing on Channel 4 News to announce the gift. In the event, with cameras rolling, Murdoch was unrepentant. ‘This is an opportunity,’ he announced, ‘for the TUC to achieve their ambition and at the same time employ the people who previously worked at the plant. It allows the trade union movement the start-up capital free of charge with no interest charges round their neck.’ And with the hint of a smile, he added that in permitting a rival newspaper to be born, ‘We will risk the competition.’ Dubbins remained unimpressed, musing, ‘I think people can’t help but be somewhat cynical about an offer from Mr Murdoch’ who ‘has got a cheek in making this offer after sacking 6,000 workers.’[62]

Union trepidation was understandable. Having come to the conclusion that they were supping with the Devil, they were asking for long spoons. But the secret of Murdoch’s success should have given them the courage of their rhetoric. He had, after all, built much of his own empire on the profits from the Sun, a seemingly unpromising newspaper he had been given virtually for free by Hugh Cudlipp. Might the unions not also make the most of such a golden opportunity? Eager to add to the number of Labour-supporting newspapers, Neil Kinnock thought this new gift should not be casually discarded just because it came from a man the print unions detested. Clive Thornton, the former chairman of the Mirror Group and a director of the proposed left-wing tabloid News on Sunday, agreed, arguing that ‘if [the unions] have got any imagination they should use it to see the prospects. Murdoch has used his imagination in making the offer. The unions should use theirs too.’[63] But the TUC’s general secretary would have none of it. Addressing eight thousand demonstrators in Trafalgar Square before marching them off to besiege Fortress Wapping, Norman Willis snubbed the Gray’s Inn Road offer: ‘We put print workers before print works. Our priority has to be people not property.’[64]

When negotiations recommenced at the Hyde Park Hotel on 16 April both sides made new bids. News International offered a £15 million exgratia payment to its sacked employees. A forty-year-old printer who had been employed for twenty years on £24,000 per annum could expect a £10,000 payout. In return, Brenda Dean put forward TUC proposals in which News International would recognize a ‘National Joint Committee’ representing all union members (including the NGA and SOGAT) it would employ. This new body (and not the individual unions that comprised it) would have sole negotiating rights on pay and conditions and would recognize management’s right to determine staffing levels.[65] Given the cold hostility of the first weeks of the strike, here at least were signs of movement from both sides. But there was now a more fundamental issue at stake: could the union negotiators deliver a deal that their members would accept? From Sydney, Murdoch wrote to Bruce Matthews, asking him to extend the deadline for acceptance of the Gray’s Inn Road plant and expressing his concern that ‘Brenda has lost control irretrievably.’[66]

There were plenty of signs that the moderates were not in control. On the night of 9 April, about 450 thugs attacked the TNT distribution depot at Byfleet in Surrey, hurling bricks and missiles, throwing nails in the way of the lorry tyres and smashing the windscreens of three lorries trying to deliver copies of The Times to the depot. A TNT manager was grabbed, punched and kicked. The police had to send for reinforcements and an adjacent garden wall collapsed. Two nights later, a further attack by balaclava-wearing individuals was launched upon a John Menzies distribution depot at Southend in Essex causing further damage. But it was not until 3 May – the ninety-seventh day of the dispute – that the worst violence erupted when a concerted attack was made to occupy and destroy the Wapping plant itself.

Two marches – one from the west, the other from the east – converged on the Wapping Highway where the police had barricaded the entrance to the site down into Virginia Street. Seven thousand protestors easily outnumbered the 1700 police blocking the entrance. The first charge on the police line at Virginia Street was ferocious. Coming under a hail of bricks, smoke bombs, bottles and sharpened railings, the police were pushed back as the mob surged forward, seized the barricades and pushed on towards the gates to the plant. Fearing the insurgents were on the verge of smashing their way in, the mounted police arrived just in time to push them back to the original line of defence. The police sustained heavy casualties as the volley of projectiles continued to rain down upon them and a detachment in riot gear was sent behind the assailants’ line to pull out from the crowd those throwing the missiles. But the ‘snatch squad’ approaching the mob from Wellclose Square was hopelessly outnumbered. It soon became clear that unless they were rescued quickly their lives would be in danger as the mob closed in upon them. The decision was taken to smash a way through the rioters’ lines in order to free the encircled policemen. A second charge by mounted police was ordered. ‘We gave no warnings of the charges because there was no time,’ the Met’s deputy assistant commissioner, Wyn Jones, admitted, adding, ‘The officers in the square were in danger.’ The charge certainly smashed through some of the demonstrators who were not involved in the violent rampage and truncheons struck a BBC camera crew in the ensuing melee. One hundred and fifty demonstrators were injured in the mounted charges, but the endangered policemen were rescued and the assault on the plant repulsed back to the original defence line along the Wapping Highway. Of eighty-one arrested, twenty-five were print workers. The police that night suffered 175 injuries, some of them spending days in hospital. One WPC was badly burned by a smoke bomb that was thrown at her. Another was hit over the head with a concrete slab. From her hospital bed, she recalled, ‘I could hear women shouting “another Yvonne Fletcher. I hope she dies.”’[67]

Tony Benn, who had addressed the meeting before the riot began, proceeded to condemn what he described as a ‘massive police attack on perfectly innocent people’. In response, The Times leader column was puce with rage, demanding to know:

What would have happened if the police had not been present at Wapping on Saturday? No doubt the crowd would have invaded the plant, destroyed much of the equipment and physically attacked those working there. Many people would have been seriously injured and it is by no means improbable in the circumstances that several people would have been killed.[68]

One consequence was more positive. Brenda Dean, together with NGA representatives, met Scotland Yard’s Wyn Jones to discuss ways in which the demonstrations could be run and policed with less violence. Telephone contact was established between union officials and the police officer in charge. But it was little deterrent to the activists who nightly attached themselves to the printers’ cause. In the London area alone, twenty-nine separate groups organized money raising and support back-up for the pickets under an umbrella title, the ‘Union of Printworkers Support Groups’. The Socialist Workers’ Party helped to bring together the various groups who had supported the miners in their year-long struggle. There was also a ‘Policing Research and Monitoring Group’ in which the Communist Party member and Marxism Today contributor Cathie Lloyd was active in logging allegations of police brutality. The National Council for Civil Liberties was also quick to blame the law enforcers for the breakdown of order. The official statistics told a different story. By mid-May, there had been 851 arrests and 332 police officers injured. There had also been 296 incidents involving TNT vans, including ninety-two smashed windows and thirty-five drivers assaulted.[69]

Meanwhile, SOGAT had finally done a volte-face. On 8 May it purged its contempt of court by withdrawing its instruction to wholesalers to black all News International titles. Given the failure of the tactic, it was hardly a major concession, but it did unfreeze the union’s £17 million assets. Some felt the union had suffered enough and looked for a more equitable sharing of the hardship. ‘The NGA were sitting relatively pretty,’ Brenda Dean later asserted. ‘We were taking the great burden of the dispute although it was projected as the “print unions” dispute.’[70] The Wapping management saw the strained relations between Dean and Dubbins as an opportunity, believing SOGAT’s leadership was far more open to agreeing a negotiated settlement than their NGA counterparts. The decision was taken to treat with them separately. Murdoch’s private Gulfstream jet secretly picked up Dean and her deputy, Bill Miles, and flew them, along with Bruce Matthews, to Los Angeles. From there they were taken to the Beverly Hills villa that Murdoch was renting from the James Bond actor, Roger Moore. It was hoped this would provide the right environment to conclude a deal that could then be presented as a fait accompli to the NGA leadership. Murdoch offered £50 million to his ex-employees.[71] A deal appeared to be all but agreed. But Dean had to sell it to her members. This she singularly failed to do.

It was easy to understand Dean’s timidity. SOGAT’s London branches convened their four-thousand members at Westminster Central Hall on 19 May. They agreed a plan to intensify the siege. One branch official was cheered when he suggested setting fire to any ballot papers that excluded reinstatement to work at Wapping. In contrast, when Dean stood up to address her assembled warriors, she was met with a volley of abuse. Her speech was heckled throughout, particularly at those junctures where she counselled moderation and her open-minded attitude towards accepting the Gray’s Inn Road offer. It was not the time or place to admit she had been covertly dealing with the enemy while relaxing around Roger Moore’s swimming pool.

Dean’s failure to tell her members what had been discussed made matters difficult. Murdoch had set a 30 May deadline. On 26 May he flew in for talks with all the principal players (including Norman Willis of the TUC) at the Sheraton Skyline Hotel at Heathrow. As the discussions proceeded, Murdoch added the front part of the Sunday Times building to the Gray’s Inn Road offer. If new job opportunities became available at Wapping, the sacked print workers would be free to apply for them. But he rejected the unions’ idea of a national joint committee on the grounds that its arbitration procedures would not be legally binding. In any case, he questioned whether it would be acceptable to those currently working at Wapping. ‘Did they want to belong to the NGA?’ he asked, before adding that he doubted it. His £50 million redundancy offer was final: News International ‘was not a money fountain’. In seventeen years, its profits had amounted to about £200 million but capital expenditure had been £197 million. Time was short. The unions should accept. This was his final offer.[72] He gave an equally uncompromising response to reporters later that day. He would not sacrifice those currently ‘doing a magnificent job’ at Wapping since ‘our loyalty is to the people who are working for us, not to the people who went on strike’. If the latter rejected his offer then so be it: ‘That’s it. I am catching the next plane home.’[73]

The union leaders put the package to a vote of their members well aware that Murdoch was not bluffing. Maintaining that the offer ‘fell short in every respect’ Dubbins recommended his NGA members reject it.[74] In this he was in step with the mood of the union. Indeed, the belligerence at a meeting of eight hundred NGA members was so strongly against even holding a ballot that no one spoke up in favour of accepting the offer. Dean’s tactics were somewhat different. She made clear there was little likelihood of a better offer being made if her members voted no, but she did not risk the personal consequences of formally endorsing a yes vote. Even the procedure by which the ballot was held attracted suspicion and attempts at sabotage. No sooner had the voting papers gone out in the post than SOGAT activists launched a High Court injunction attempt to scrap the vote on the grounds that the papers were being sent out to individual members instead of the traditional procedure of being given to the chapel officers for distribution. The legal attempt failed but it would not have made much difference to the outcome. SOGAT members rejected the settlement by 2081 to 1415, the NGA by 648 to 165 and the smallest union involved, the AEU, by 112 to 56.

Dubbins greeted the news by making clear his union would ‘step up this dispute’. Murdoch’s reaction was to repeat that there would be no new offer. Gray’s Inn Road would now be sold commercially instead, the profits from its sale going into News International’s coffers rather than being put at the disposal of the TUC. There would be no new left-leaning newspaper, no jobs for the ex-print workers to take up in producing it. It was, in Bruce Matthews’s words, the unions’ ‘second suicide.’

In fact, there was a perfectly rational explanation for why the vote had gone against reaching an agreement: most of the ex-print workers had already gained employment elsewhere (SOGAT admitted that only a third of its affected members were still eligible for unemployment benefit).[75] Thus they were in no rush to reach a deal. Rather, they would hold out indefinitely, tightening all the while the screw on the Wapping siege until Murdoch, in desperation, came back with a larger payout. To this prospect, Matthews warned, ‘if there is an escalation of violence, I think they will isolate themselves from every section of the community.’[76]

VI

On Monday 2 June – even before the results of the ballot had been announced – new and yet more thuggish tactics were being deployed to smash The Times and its Wapping stable mates. Instead of concentrating on trying to block the newspapers coming out, the pickets sought to prevent the journalists going in. For two hours between eight and ten o’clock in the morning, about three hundred demonstrators descended upon the plant, taking the twenty policemen by surprise and forcing the main gates to be locked. But the worst scenes were at the rear entrance. Staff turning up for work, including secretaries and other female employees, were punched and harangued. The pickets prevented those arriving by car from reversing by blocking the road behind them with scaffolding and rubble from a nearby building site and subjecting the trapped employees to a terrifying ordeal of intimidation and threatening behaviour.

Late that night, the assault took a yet more sinister path. A News International warehouse at Convoy’s Wharf in Deptford where newsprint was being stored was fire-bombed. Two men were seen scrambling over garage roofs and along a wall before making a getaway in a waiting car. Moments later, there was a huge explosion from the warehouse followed by an enormous sheet of flame. The result was the biggest fire in London since the Blitz. The tightly packed newsprint ignited, the steel frame buckled and the roof came crashing in. At one stage the heat was so intense that police feared it would crack the windows and set fire to curtains in a nearby housing estate. Throughout the night, a fireboat pumped 26,000 gallons of water from the Thames every three minutes into the inferno. Two days afterwards, the warehouse’s contents were still smouldering. Sifting through the charred remains, police discovered petrol can caps on the floor.

The following morning, Bruce Matthews’s secretary received a telephone call from an anonymous caller with some advice for her boss: ‘That was a well-organized job last night, wasn’t it? Tell him he’ll be the next to burn.’ Although News International offered a £50,000 reward for information leading to the culprits’ arrest and conviction, nobody was ever charged. Whoever were the culprits, what was not in doubt was that they had launched a deliberate attempt to destroy Wapping’s store of newsprint. In the event, almost 10,000 tons were destroyed, of which 20 per cent (two weeks’ supply) had been intended for Wapping. A lorry and trailers were also incinerated. In all, £7 million of damage was incurred.[77]

A couple of days after the Deptford fire, Eric Hammond answered the telephone to a caller who assured him, ‘You and your family are going to burn, you bastard.’ He later recognized the voice when he was heckled while giving an interview. It belonged to someone with ‘an honoured presence in SOGAT’.[78] At the annual TUC conference in Brighton, Hammond had to be accompanied by bodyguards wherever he went. The Sunday Times editor, Andrew Neil, also received death threats, with his home in Onslow Gardens becoming a regular destination for hate mail. When he appeared on the panel of BBC TV’s Question Time, demonstrators smashed the building’s windows and at one point the electricity was cut, plunging the studio into darkness. On another occasion, Neil’s attempts to honour an invitation from the Institute of Journalists had to be abandoned when strikers threw smoke bombs into the basement where the meeting was in progress.[79] Marmaduke Hussey had to endure obscene abuse being hurled at him by a picket who accosted him as he was getting into his car. As Hussey levered himself into the driving seat the picket slammed the car door on Hussey’s leg. Luckily it was his artificial leg (he had been seriously wounded in the Second World War) and the door ‘bounced back with an almighty clang’. The picket was somewhat taken aback.[80]

Throughout the summer, the spate of targeted attacks continued apace. On 19 June, a TNT distribution depot for The Times at Snodland in Kent was attacked by masked intruders who shattered windscreens and damaged property. This was not just a hit and run mission by a few desperados: four hundred demonstrators marched on the depot. Six days later, forty men armed with iron bars smashed into a TNT depot in Luton, attacked police officers with bricks and missiles and destroyed vans while two hundred demonstrators picketed outside. A similar assault was launched eleven days later, causing more criminal damage at a TNT depot in Eastleigh, Hampshire.[81] The varied geography of these locations, the premeditated collection of weapons and the size of the supporting demonstration highlighted the organized extent of the campaign being waged against News International and its interests.

Yet, violent methods – whether by or on behalf of the sacked print workers – were a sign of desperation. In rejecting a £50 million financial settlement and having failed to stop or seriously hamper production at Wapping, such measures appeared to be all the activists had left with which to fight. For those enduring the daily abuse and intimidation on their way in and out of work, this was particularly unnerving. But the question now was whether the militant forces within SOGAT would seek to oust Brenda Dean and all other moderating influences within their union. The showdown came in mid-June at the SOGAT annual conference in Scarborough. Dean entered the hall to shouts of ‘Judas’. But her speech was uncompromising, making clear that no one branch of ‘wreckers’ was going to determine the union’s destiny as a whole. She rounded on the street-corner chants that alleged she had sold her London members down the river: ‘That sort of chant usually comes from those who failed to recognize that there was no longer any river to sell them down.’ It was a strong performance and she carried the day. The conference voted to leave the National Executive in charge of handling the dispute rather than devolving it to the militant London chapel. In a decision that would only later take on great significance, the conference also agreed that the union could not take any action that led to its assets being sequestrated a second time. The will of the provincial majority had prevailed – to the disgust of activists from London. The extent of this culture clash was manifest when one London member, in the course of berating Dean, asked her how he was expected to meet his £50,000 mortgage. Dean attempted to explain: ‘If I go and tell the rest of the union you need help with that mortgage, you’ll get nothing. They’re living in houses that don’t cost half of that as a total cost.’[82]

The situation was a stalemate. The News International management was not prepared to improve the offer and the union leadership had been given no room for manoeuvre by its members. To Times journalists the situation was becoming close to intolerable. Those driving into work sometimes spotted strikers noting down their number plates. Some noticed their photographs being taken. Given what had happened at Deptford, this was an effective form of intimidation. What was more, Wapping in 1986 afforded few of the lunchtime and evening comforts to which journalists were accustomed. Even if there had been pubs or restaurants worth patronizing, it was too risky to do so. Many felt marooned inside the compound, a fate as bad for personal morale as it was for getting out in search of news stories. What made matters worse was the limitations of the office environment. A casualty of the move from Gray’s Inn Road was The Times library. Six months after the move to Wapping, Times journalists were still separated from their paper’s books archive and picture library which had been left behind at their former site. In view of staff and space shortage, it was decided to base Wapping’s library around the News of the World’s holdings with the other papers merely adding what contents they could fit in. This was a short-sighted economy of scale. For the next few years, the paper had to continue to make do with inadequate information resources (although, in truth, whether they were better or worse than the previous Times library was debatable). Although improving internet research engines made life easier in the 1990s and there was a sizeable cuttings library, the newspaper still had to rely upon a lamentable range of source material on the communal bookshelves.

Times journalists had other causes of woe. When they moved to Wapping, the basic journalists’ salary at the paper was, at £15,050, around £5000 less than the equivalent at the News of the World and the Sun. There was a good reason for this: the tabloids made money and The Times made a loss. But the broadsheet’s writers felt they deserved remuneration that represented – to put it mildly – something closer to parity of esteem. On this score, Wapping represented a great opportunity. It threatened to make even The Times profitable. The paper’s NUJ chapel, led by its new father, the religious affairs correspondent, Clifford Longley, seized the moment to press home the advantage, demanding: ‘The time is now right for The Times to make good its claim to be the greatest newspaper in the world, which dictates in turn salaries appropriate to that status … We feel therefore that our goodwill has been exploited for many years.’ The chapel demanded a pay increase of 25 per cent and proper compensation for those who departed citing they felt themselves ‘unable to come to terms with the move to Wapping and/or the introduction of new technology’. The salary demand ignored the fact that the company had increased average pay at the paper by 27.2 per cent between March 1985 and March 1986. As far as Longley was concerned, this was not the point; Times staff were still ‘at the bottom of the Fleet Street pay league’. The paper’s managing editor, Mike Hoy, was incredulous. Inflation was running at around 4 per cent. He assured the NUJ chapel that if they wanted a significantly steeper rise they would have to conclude the sort of agreement that management had demanded from the print unions. This would involve working five days a week (many journalists still managed just four), a no-strike clause, legally binding arbitration and no closed shop.[83]

On 9 June, Sun journalists, unhappy with a 3.5 per cent pay offer, narrowly voted to strike. A panicked management swiftly increased the offer to 10 per cent and the threat was averted. The Times NUJ chapel followed suit and were duly rewarded with a ‘full and final offer’ of 10 per cent as well. But the animosity towards not only the managerial but editorial high command was clear when the chapel made a formal complaint to Charles Wilson over the paper’s failure to report the original strike vote at the Sun. Furthermore, the chapel voted by eighty votes to two to strike if the refuseniks who had declined to cross the Wapping picket line were not reinstated.

This was a serious shot across the bows. Only a third of the paper’s NUJ members had attended and voted in the meeting but it only took this number to wreck the paper. Some wondered if the spirit that had animated the active minority of Times journalists to go on strike in 1980 – thereby ensuring the paper’s sale – had suddenly gripped the chapel once more in this latest period of crisis. Wilson responded by writing a four-page letter to his staff, appealing to them to stay at their desks. Aside from the specifics of the individual refuseniks’ cases, The Times’s future would be threatened at the very moment it was on the verge of breaking free from the dead hand of those who were making the journalists’ lives so unpleasant from the other side of the wire.[84] Longley, however, was making a stand. He spurned the higher pay offer on the grounds that ‘we will not discuss money with you while the jobs of six sacked members are at issue. It would be immoral to talk about money.’[85] Yet, in the event, the religious affairs correspondent was deserted by his flock: the chapel voted not to strike over the refuseniks’ fate by sixty-three to twenty-eight. In September, Longley became a martyr to his own cause when the NUJ Executive Committee summoned him before a disciplinary hearing on a charge of conduct detrimental to the interests of the union (for not being a refusenik himself). His first reaction was to get a temporary court injunction against the hearing going ahead. When that failed his union found him guilty, but voted narrowly to censure rather than expel him.[86] Perhaps they realized the negative consequences of ridding themselves of a turbulent priest.

While dissent from and between NUJ officials was being seen off, News International had decided, once again, to seek legal redress against the manner in which the siege was being conducted. On 31 July, High Court injunctions were granted that permitted the unions to hold demonstrations only on the condition they passed the Wapping plant and did not seek to block it. Any attempt at the latter would be construed as an official picket that, under the terms of the 1982 Trade Union Act, was limited to six individuals. Mr Justice Stuart-Smith reminded the unions that ‘freedom of speech has never extended to intimidation, abuse and threats directed at those going about their lawful business’.[87] Unions who failed to restrict the Wapping picket to six individuals would be liable to fines or resequestration. TNT promptly launched similar injunctions against mass action at their depots. At 2.30 in the morning of 1 August, only a few hours after the High Court had pronounced against mass picketing, a mob of two hundred attacked a TNT distribution depot at Thetford, Norfolk. Besides smashing up vans, the assailants tried to set the depot ablaze by firing flares into the building. In this they were unsuccessful although they did manage to torch bundles of The Times that had just been unloaded.[88]

Having paid a heavy financial penalty the last time they had come up for contempt of court, the unions took this new legal threat seriously and SOGAT’s head office ordered its London branch leaders to cooperate with the letter of the law.[89] Indeed, while the NGA and SOGAT leadership were busy trying to get the EETPU expelled from the TUC, they were also receptive to a further attempt to reach a settlement with News International. In late August and early September, they had a series of talks with Bill O’Neill at a hotel near Gatwick. The issue of a national joint committee to represent members of all unions at Wapping was again raised. O’Neill parried that this would be a matter for the existing Wapping employees to decide and ‘if pushed now’ they would reject the mechanism. O’Neill advised an eighteen-month ‘cooling-off period’ before the proposal was put to them.[90] In the meantime, the unions should settle. As an inducement, the redundancy offer was increased from £50 million to £58 million. The unions agreed to put it to their members. Once again, the ballot papers went out in the post.

There was confusion over who was still entitled to vote. The majority of the four thousand affected SOGAT members had now got jobs elsewhere. Nonetheless, Dean got her way in insisting that since the settlement concerned them too they had the right to decide it. The vote was announced on 8 October. SOGAT members rejected the improved offer by 2372 votes to 960 while NGA members rejected it by 556 to 116 (and the AUEW members by 107 to 47).[91] News International’s attempts to get a package approved collectively had now failed not once but twice. A grand negotiated settlement had proved impossible. Henceforth, the company would try a new tactic, making individual offers over the collective leadership’s heads. The dismissed employees would be picked off one by one.

In the fortnight after the vote, management received 180 letters from sacked print workers responding to the prospect of a private settlement.[92] By the time the first anniversary of the strike approached, 1750 had reached agreement. State unemployment benefit was due to end on that date. In order to raise the £2 million need to finance those who continued to be out of work, the SOGAT leadership proposed a six month fifty-eight pence a week levy on all its members nationwide. The membership voted by 51,187 to 44,265 not to contribute.[93] Most, it seemed, had had enough of encouraging the London branch to persist in fighting a war that was clearly lost. On 20 January 1987, a further squeeze was imposed when News International went to court to seek from the unions the costs of Wapping’s security measures over the past six months. Events were, it seemed, approaching a denouement. Few appreciated that the worst bout of violence was about to be unleashed.

VII

The massed assault on Wapping that took place on the night of 24 January was timed to commemorate the first anniversary of the strike. But its ferocity was sharpened both by the realization that the resistance of strikers was crumbling and by a tragedy that had taken place the previous fortnight. A nineteen-year-old youth, Michael Delaney, was killed trying to confront a TNT lorry in Stepney. Delaney, who had no connection with the dispute, had gone under the wheels while banging on the side of the truck and shouting ‘scab’.[94] Lamentably, The Times failed to report the death when it occurred although it did subsequently cover the inquest three months later. A combination of these factors contributed to the dark mood animating those who planned the first-anniversary Wapping attack.

About 12,500 demonstrators marched on the site. The company’s security cameras showed a relatively non-violent protest in progress until 7.30 p.m. But the ensuing assault had been carefully planned. The first sign that an orchestrated offensive was being unleashed came when an attempt was made to electronically jam police communications. Then a sting wire was unfurled across the road with the intention of maiming police horses and their riders. There was also an attempt to ignite petrol when five litres were spilled onto the road in front of the police officers. Some rioters overturned a lorry – the same one that had carried the band that had led the march to Wapping – and tried to set it on fire. Missiles were thrown. Uniformed police fell back to be replaced by those in riot gear. An hour later, the police lines had succeeded in pushing the demonstrators back from the top of Virginia Street into the Wapping Highway. Brenda Dean could be heard from the union rostrum lecturing the police to stop harassing the crowd. The security cameras then recorded an unidentified man wearing an armband apparently assuming command of the agitators. He called a group of about twenty-four of them into line. They were all wearing balaclavas and scarves over their faces. This vanguard launched itself at the police, trying to drive them back into Virginia Street. Under a hail of broken bricks and pieces of paving stones, the police line faltered. Mounted police tried to shore up the line and grab some of the activists only to be answered with a hail of thunderflashes, petrol bombs and scaffolding poles. The police sustained many injuries.[95]

Such was the ferocity of the assault that at one point the attackers looked like breaking through into the compound. At the opposite end of The Times building, Andrew Neil’s office was dangerously close to the main gate. Fearing it was about to be overrun, Neil’s bodyguard burst in and tried to persuade him to retreat to the print hall building where he could hide in the last redoubt – locked in behind the steel fire doors at its heart. Neil, who was in mid-meeting, would not be moved. He opted to stay behind with his staff, although he did ask ‘them to check that the underground passages connecting our building with the main facility – and our last line of refuge – were open and clear for a dash to safety’.[96]

The audit of war produced sixty-seven arrests (of which thirteen were print workers) and injuries to thirty-nine police officers. Eleven police horses were injured and nine police vehicles damaged. Around thirty demonstrators suffered injuries when mounted police tried to push the surging crowds back. Barbara Cohen, a spokeswoman for a team of observers filing a legal report to the Home Secretary, blamed the police for the problem on the grounds that ‘there was barely a visible police presence during the march, which was peaceful and orderly. When the marchers reached Wapping, the sight of rows of riot police equipped for violent conflict raised the tension.’ Among the Labour MPs who had addressed the demonstration was Dennis Skinner who told the crowds that Labour’s chances of success at the next general election depended upon ‘extra-parliamentary activity’ to ‘win it on the streets’.[97] Certainly, a portion of the streets was ripped up as the pile of discarded weaponry, including chunks of paving stone, assembled by the police the following day demonstrated. A permanent legacy of the night was left in the rows of missing spikes removed from the Wapping Highway’s Victorian iron railings. They had been thrown as javelins at the police.

While some in the Labour Movement chose to see the riot as a consequence of police brutality, others were appalled at the discredit it was attaching to the cause. Neil Kinnock described the violence as ‘hideous and horrifying’ while Norman Willis condemned the ‘disgraceful and violent scenes’.[98] Indeed, Willis was now adamant that the strategy of organizing mass demonstrations at Wapping had to stop. The morning after the riot, Dean telephoned Bill O’Neill to request an urgent meeting. O’Neill, who was completing the process of his US naturalization, made clear he could not leave America and wondered if it could wait until he returned. Dean was determined to meet sooner, adding that she wanted the strike brought to an end before her executive met on 5 February. With Bill Miles, she flew to Paris and there caught Concorde to cross the Atlantic.

Dean and Miles met O’Neill in the ground-floor coffee shop of the Hilton at New York’s JFK airport. Dean mentioned the decision of the SOGAT annual conference that mandated the union not to act in a way that risked a further sequestration. If News International took SOGAT to court on a further contempt charge, she would be in a position to get her executive to call the strike off without putting the question to the die-hard strikers. Attracted by the force of what had been put to him, O’Neill went to a pay phone to call Geoffrey Richards for his legal advice. While he was trying to get through, a woman picked up an adjacent pay telephone and could be heard speaking into the receiver: ‘Could I have “copy”?… I want you to know that I’ve been here for over an hour and it seems as though they have come up with a way to bring this strike to an end … They’re analysing a formula now and I will stay here and see how it works out.’ Dean, Miles and O’Neill froze in panic. How had their meeting been rumbled? The three hurried into the hotel lobby which they found packed with reporters and television cameras. And then they noticed they were being ignored. It transpired that the hotel was also the venue for resolving a Long Island railway dispute. Their relief was palpable. Less than three hours after they had touched down at JFK, Dean and Miles caught another Concorde flight home.[99] In the meantime, the mechanism to end the dispute had been agreed.

Soon afterwards, O’Neill flew back across the Atlantic. On 2 February he and Geoffrey Richards met Dean and Miles for dinner at the home of SOGAT’s lawyer. Dean accepted that the strike had been lost long ago and its protraction was only damaging the union’s image. A court hearing was set for 6 February. The video footage of the 24 January riot, showing a two-hundred-strong mob trying to smash down the gates to Wapping, supported News International’s case that the unions were in breach of their legal undertakings to keep to six pickets. The unions stood to have all their assets sequestrated and to face potentially crippling fines of up to £3 million. Over half of SOGAT’s funds had already been spent fighting the dispute and the union’s legal advice was to call off the strike or face bankruptcy. SOGAT’s existence could be decided by what line its National Executive took. On 5 February, it met. Seven London members argued vociferously against surrender, but they were outnumbered. The final vote was twenty-three to nine in favour of calling off the strike. Dean prepared a press release, explaining, ‘a further sequestration would have meant the demise of our union’ and adding ‘we will never forget this dispute and the ravages of it will be evident for a long time to come’. Then she rang O’Neill. ‘I’ve had a terrible day,’ she told him.[100]

With SOGAT’s surrender, so collapsed the resistance of its comrades. The NUJ called off its action the following day. All eyes turned to the NGA. Tony Dubbins telephoned O’Neill to plead for a weekend’s grace. O’Neill replied that he had but a few hours to submit or face ruin in court. A clerk from Farrar’s was waiting at the court with orders to file News International’s petition if no news had been received by 3 p.m. The hands of the clock moved slowly around but nothing was heard. Then, a few minutes before three, as O’Neill was preparing to contact the Farrar’s clerk, the telephone rang. It was Dubbins offering unconditional surrender. When the news reached the pickets, there was angry talk among some of them about continuing the blockade by unofficial means. This was quickly quelled by the threat of being ejected from the union. At 4 a.m. on Saturday 7 February the official picket packed up and departed. The siege of Wapping was over. It had lasted fifty-four weeks.

VIII

Relief was the overwhelming emotion that swept over Times staff as the realization dawned that their daily ordeal was finally over. The paper’s leader column summed up the past thirteen months as a period in which ‘We were set free from damaging trade union practices inside our gates. We exchanged them for damaging trade union practices outside.’[101] But many, especially at management level, also felt a quiet sense of satisfaction. In 1978, The Times had taken on its print unions and, after an eleven-month shutdown, been forced to capitulate to them. It had taken eight years, but here at last was the moment of retribution. Everyone who had crossed the picket line had played his or her part. But in devising and implementing the strategy that made Murdoch’s success possible, Charles Wilson, Bruce Matthews, Bill O’Neill and Geoffrey Richards had the most reason to feel proud of their achievement. They were the principal architects of the Wapping revolution. Yet the celebrations were muted. In particular, the dispute had weighed heavily upon Matthews. He had hoped an accommodation might be made to re-employ some of the more moderate print union members but Murdoch was insistent that a complete break had to be made – that, after all, was the point of Wapping and no fresh NGA or SOGAT presence could be recreated there.[102] Tired of the persistent wrangling on both sides of the Wapping barbed wire, in November 1986 a despondent Matthews cleared his desk as managing director before the final victory had been assured. O’Neill took his place. None of the print union members who had been friends with Tony Norbury before the dispute ever spoke to him again. He calculated that Wapping had diminished his social life by 75 per cent. But as the man behind getting The Times produced from its new location, he never doubted that he had done the right thing, both for the future of his newspaper and for the unfettering of British print journalism.[103]

Victory had come at a cost. Five hundred and seventy-four police officers had been injured and more than a thousand News International and TNT drivers or their vehicles had been attacked. Some had broken arms. Others had glass in their eyes. One driver had had his windscreen broken twenty-three times. For their part, the protestors had also taken a toll. One young man had been killed. Nearly 1500 people had been arrested, two-thirds of whom were convicted. Police attendance at Wapping had averaged three hundred a day (on crucial nights there had been a thousand protecting the site). The estimated cost of this to the taxpayer exceeded £5 million.[104] News International honoured its £58 million redundancy payout. Depending upon their time with the company, recipients received between £2000 and £30,000 each.

‘Little direct good ever comes out of a dispute of this kind – it’s a fairly sad story,’ was the Employment Secretary Ken Clarke’s downbeat verdict on the strike’s end, although he did add, ‘but I think the lasting effects may be beneficial.’[105] Some of his Cabinet colleagues were more cheerful. Indeed, commentators soon assumed that the greatest victor was not Murdoch and his newspapers but Margaret Thatcher in her battle to smash union power in Britain. She had seen off Arthur Scargill over the mines in a fight that symbolized the fate of the old industries. Wapping demonstrated that the unions would not control the destiny of the new technology-driven industries either.

Certainly, union militancy had been dealt a crushing blow. The NGA and SOGAT began a period of re-evaluation that led to their merger in 1991 as the Graphical, Paper and Media Union (GPMU) with Tony Dubbins as general secretary. Brenda Dean became the new union’s deputy leader but retired the following year. Accepting a peerage as Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde, she became an active member of parliamentary committees, health and higher education boards, the Press Complaints Commission and a variety of other bodies. In 1997, she became chairman of the Housing Corporation. Ironically, one who was disappointed by Wapping’s legacy was the union leader who had done so much to make it possible, Eric Hammond. While his members had staffed the plant from the first, he had put off pressing for formal EETPU recognition in accordance with TUC policy. But when, in 1988, the TUC finally expelled the union over its involvement in no-strike deals (and, it was widely presumed, participation in Wapping), Hammond felt free from TUC censure to explore collective bargaining rights there. His attempts were rebuffed, first by O’Neill and subsequently in a painful correspondence with Murdoch. Hammond could have been forgiven for feeling used. In his memoirs he was moved to write that Murdoch had ‘shown no spark of gratitude, even though he couldn’t have succeeded without us, and without the support of our people at Wapping’.[106]

Another major union to lose out was the NUJ. In August 1987, a new disputes procedure involving ACAS was agreed at The Times that all but banished the grounds for a journalists’ strike. For its part, the NUJ had not done much to endear itself. Its National Executive had sought to impose £1000 fines on ninety-five News International employees (forty-eight of them Times journalists) for crossing the Wapping picket line during the siege. They were singled out because their names had appeared in news reports (another 320 were acquitted because their names did not).[107] The Times NUJ chapel responded by freezing its payments to the union and the fines were eventually dropped but not before irreparable damage had been done. The union was, in any case, in disarray. Among other eccentricities, its accounts had been kept during the 1980s by an official who refused to switch from ledgers to a computer database. Eventually, the accounts were handed over instead to someone whose fake credentials were revealed after the reference he had provided transpired to be the number of a public telephone box.[108] The belief that the union was having difficulty putting its house in order did it much harm. By the 1990s, the once all conquering NUJ had been reduced to but a small bargaining presence in Fleet Street. The Times and its Wapping stable-mates opted for total derecognition of the union. The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Independent followed suit.[109] Even the left-leaning Daily Mirror refused to recognize the NUJ. This was part of a wider process fuelled by the policies of the Thatcher years and the restructuring of the economy. In 1980, 70 per cent of wages in Britain were set through collective bargaining. By 1998, the figure had fallen to 35 per cent. Only a third of companies established since 1980 recognized unions.[110]

The consequences of Murdoch’s victory for British politics or the Labour Movement can be debated. But what can be more easily assessed was the direct effect it had on The Times newspaper. By ditching the print unions there was, of course, a huge saving in cutting the surplus workforce. But Wapping also ensured massive improvements to the way the paper’s content could be altered at short notice. At the unionized Gray’s Inn Road, the paper was limited to making around a dozen significant page changes per night. But at Wapping it was possible to make between thirty and fifty page changes a night and to tinker with a front page that usually changed six times over the course of the evening.[111] It had formerly taken the print union members forty-five minutes to make a single change to a graphic. Wapping’s staff could do it in five minutes. Late changes to stories could be done at the press of a button. At Gray’s Inn Road, a late change had involved adhering to a lengthy set of union demarcation procedures. First of all, a request would be made to the composing department to come down with a proof. The changes would be marked onto the proof. The proof would then be taken (by hand) back up to the composing department. The comp would then type in the changes and these would be checked again to make sure they had been done correctly (which frequently they were not). A minor change to a story could take thirty to forty-five minutes to enact. Whether the copy or a new headline fitted the allotted space was a matter of trial and error. Wapping’s direct-input computers gave journalists an instant ‘copy fit’ thereby making page planning easy. Correspondents’ copy and agency wires could also be brought onto the system at the touch of a button. Previously, they had to wait until a messenger brought them over to the right desk (if he got the right desk) in his own time.[112] Errors and spelling mistakes – once the bane of Fleet Street journalism – could now be quickly corrected. The last edition of The Times to come from Gray’s Inn Road contained 150 misprints in thirty-two pages. The Times of (taking a day at random) 7 May 1987 contained just fourteen in thirty-eight pages. Wapping gave the reader a better product.

Yet the gains were by no means all down to new technology. Although the arrival of computers on the editorial floor greatly speeded up the process of writing and subbing the paper, in other parts of the production process The Times was still being produced in an old-fashioned manner. The page make-up techniques and printing presses used at Wapping were essentially those the print unions had operated at Gray’s Inn Road. In the Napoleonic vaulted basement of The Times’s Wapping home, stylish girls fresh from art college replaced old union lags but they were doing the same task – laying out the pages with scissors and paste. Late changes were often effected by scrambling about on the floor for excised words on tiny trimmed rectangles of paper. Frequently the missing word would be found stuck to someone’s shoe. Thus the difference was not in the tools for the job but in the attitude and adaptability of those who wielded them. Wapping’s ‘paste-up’ team cut the time it took from ‘last-copy-to-composition’ and the last page leaving the stone from sixty-five to ten minutes. What used not to be ready until after 9 p.m. was now completed by 8.10 p.m. And, in the longer term, removing union power at management level did smooth the way for the easier adoption of the technological revolutions of the 1990s – colour, fast redesign, better computer-generated graphics and vastly improved print and picture reproduction.

There was, however, a downside to the move to Wapping and the dispersal of the other newspaper offices that it hastened. By destroying the village of Fleet Street, the geographically tight-knit community that allowed journalists and their contacts to lunch together, dine together and drink together, it reduced not only the convivial quality of life to which many reporters had become accustomed but also their ability to trade contacts and insights from outside the office. The Wapping move did encourage less adventurous journalists to confine the world to what was presented on their computer terminals, rather than going out themselves in search of stories. It is, of course, possible to make too much of this and to overemphasize the extent to which indulging in a long liquid lunch with friends constituted searching for news. On a narrow measure, the destruction of the Fleet Street lunch certainly improved productivity even if a part of the journalistic soul died as a consequence. Health-wise, it was probably a godsend.

Ultimately, what the Wapping revolution delivered could be summed up in one word – flexibility. It gave The Times’s production and editorial staff the means to change, alter, innovate and increase the size or quantity of their paper without months of haggling with shop stewards intent on preventing any change without first extracting an inflated price. Murdoch had described the old world from which Wapping permitted him to escape:

If you wanted to change a column width in The Times it would take you three months to negotiate and £10 a day or a week to everybody in the plant. And in the meantime, having to put up with one hundred typos on page one every second day if people felt they had a bad liver or something.[113]

The barriers to innovation were now swept away. This was not merely a time saving exercise in the nightly rush to press. Strategic changes could at last be enacted. In 1987, The Times came out on Boxing Day for the first time in seventy years (although some readers imagined a Boxing Day newspaper was a disturbing sign of the secular consumerism of the 1980s, The Times had continuously come out on every Boxing Day from 1785 to 1917). Without Wapping, it is hard to envisage the unreformed print unions agreeing to work on such an edition or the rail unions being willing to carry it to its distributors.

Even more importantly, the pagination of the newspaper was expanded. In the first six months of printing at Wapping, The Times was able to raise its number of pages from thirty-four to forty-eight. The only way the presses could handle the bigger paper was to print it in two sections. Thus, while news and comment remained in the main part of the paper, a second section was produced covering business and sport. Complaints flooded in and when, after a year of working at Wapping, Charles Wilson was assured that the capacity had been created to print the whole paper in one section, he took the decision to switch back. The result was a fresh broadside of complaint from readers in support of the two-section paper (many sighting the morning bliss of husband and wife being able to read the different sections over the same breakfast table). This fresh postbag, and the difficulties the presses were having in producing the paper in one section, quickly convinced Wilson to revert to a two-section newspaper. The ability to respond at this speed would have been unthinkable at Gray’s Inn Road. Nor was this the end of the matter. As the months progressed, the paper began to expand further. On 3 September 1987, a four-section, sixty-four-page Times was launched on Saturday with more pre-print colour than any other national newspaper.[114]

There was also now the possibility that The Times could buck its twentieth century history and become a newspaper that actually made a profit. The immediate consequence of moving to Wapping was a threefold increase in News International’s profitability. The Wapping plant itself had cost £100 million to build and a further £67 million to equip, but it allowed for the old premises to be sold. Bouverie Street fetched £72 million (the site was subsequently levelled for redevelopment) and The Times’s old home, Gray’s Inn Road – the building which the unions had turned down for free – was sold to ITN for £70 million.[115] Setting these sales against the expense of construction gave Wapping a net cost of £25 million (which rose significantly a few years later when the plant had to be extended), but, by ditching the print unions, News International had been able to realize job cuts that saved in the region of £65 million each year.[116] Wapping took the company’s operating income from £38.4 million in 1985 to £150.2 million in 1987.[117] One estimate suggested it had increased the four newspapers’ worth (excluding outstanding debt) from $0.3 billion to $1 billion.[118] The share price trebled. Indeed, in 1987 News International performed better than any other major company on the London stock exchange. Contributing 40 per cent of News Corp.’s global profits, Wapping pump primed Murdoch’s expansion into the American television and film network. As we will see later, this encouraged fresh borrowing that almost proved his undoing. Yet, in 2002, Peter Chernin, the News Corp. president, was in a position to reflect that the move to Wapping ‘was the most significant labour event in the world during the past forty years’, adding that he did not think the company would have survived without it.[119]

Moving to Wapping certainly helped to secure The Times’s survival, but it was not just a victory for it, News International and its shareholders. Before Wapping, the print unions had a stranglehold over the management of all Britain’s national newspapers. After Wapping, they had a toehold. As Hugo Young, the Guardian journalist who was no admirer of Murdoch’s politics, nonetheless conceded in 1993, ‘What he did for the economics of newspaper publishing, by killing the power of the worst-led trade unions in modern history, has benefited every journalist, advertiser and reader.’[120] At the moment when the siege of Wapping began, The Times’s rivals had been attempting to move to new print premises in Docklands but were frustrated by their unions refusal to accept terms that would make the move economic. Wapping enabled them to turn the tables on unions who, overnight, awoke to discover the price for not being shut out entirely was to concede much of their old bargaining power and workforce. The management at the Daily Mail’s owners, Associated Newspapers, accepted that Wapping ‘was a great help to us. When that happened, if there was any reluctance of our people to come along with us, it disappeared.’[121] Consequently, the company was able to cut its workforce by half without any loss to the production of its papers. Similarly, when the Daily Telegraph moved from Fleet Street to Docklands, its management was able to cut the print workforce from 1650 to 678, a wage bill saving of £24 million. The FT also made huge economies when it moved its printing works to Docklands in 1988. Its chief executive, Frank Barlow, had argued that the move was essential because of the ‘huge cost advantage’ that Wapping had given Murdoch.[122] In fighting for his own papers, Murdoch had won a victory for all national newspapers. Of course it might be argued that these results could have been achieved without the Wapping gamble, but the failure of Eddy Shah’s innovative and brave venture, Today – which eventually had to be rescued from collapse by Murdoch – suggests the process was far from inevitable. The Independent would have been launched regardless, but – without Wapping – its founders would have been confronted by many of the industry’s old problems. There is no certainty the little infant would have prospered under such rough midwifery. In the opinion of Ivan Fallon, its chief executive eighteen years later, ‘The Independent would not have been possible without the move to Wapping.’[123]

The battle of Wapping won a larger war for all Britain’s newspapers. But it is worth contemplating an imaginary scenario where, despite being in a weaker position, other newspaper proprietors did eventually manage, somehow, to overcome the grip of their unions, leaving Murdoch hamstrung in the old world of Fleet Street industrial relations. In this eventuality, it would have been The Times that would have found itself plunged into a perilously uncompetitive position, smashed to pieces between a new unencumbered Independent and a Daily Telegraph rejuvenated by its chief executive, Andrew Knight, both newspapers able to deploy the ways and means to consign ‘The Thunderer’ to the scrap heap. Wapping also prevented this contingency. It ensured a newspaper that was bigger, quicker, sharper and with fewer mistakes. It offered the prospect of a paper that could even become profitable. It was certainly hard to argue with the most easily measurable consequence – in the decade before the move to Wapping, The Times had lost 96.5 million copies through industrial action. In the decade following the move, it lost none.

CHAPTER SEVEN

INDEPENDENT CHALLENGES

Competition from the Independent;

the High Tide of Thatcherism; Business; Sport

I

On 7 October 1986, while The Times was still under siege at Wapping, a new direct rival struck at its heart. The Independent was the first national quality daily to be launched since the First World War. Funded by more than a hundred investors, it had no single proprietor. Its name, backed by a Saatchi & Saatchi advertising campaign based around the slogan ‘It is, are you?’ emphasized its refreshing freedom from the traditional world of press barons and private agendas. This was something that appealed to those who had never cared for Rupert Murdoch, the man or his methods.

There were good financial reasons why nobody had started a national broadsheet for so many years and the venture was, to put it mildly, a risky one. Max Hastings, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, sent the Independent a launch present of a wreath. Charles Wilson was not so cocky. On its first day, the Independent sold 600,000 copies – 130,000 more than The Times had been selling in the preceding days. A desperate fight for circulation would now commence. Just when it looked as if moving to Wapping and cutting costs was going to deliver The Times from decades of losses, a rival had arrived that risked taking away its market altogether.

The Independent was the brainchild of Andreas Whittam Smith, the Daily Telegraph’s City editor and two Telegraph leader writers, Stephen Glover and Matthew Symonds. Whittam Smith had long been talked about as a future Telegraph editor but, as time passed, a feeling that he was being passed over and that the Hartwell family were running the paper towards bankruptcy encouraged him to look to new horizons. With Glover and Symonds he had begun to plan a new paper in 1985. Given the lax regime at the Telegraph (leader writers were not expected to grace the office until well into the afternoon) Glover and Symonds were able to devote large amounts of their day to planning the new paper. It was impossible not to admire the daring of this gang of three. They were accomplished journalists, but had no experience or knowledge about how to finance, produce or distribute their product. Yet, there was no need for them to mislead potential investors about their experience because nobody in the City thought to press them on the matter. They were taken on trust. ‘The truth is,’ Glover wrote later, ‘that the world will nearly always take you at your own apparent estimation of yourself. We were engaged in a glorious bluff.’[1]

The three visionaries were assisted by two enormous strokes of good fortune. The first was that by the time they were ready with their product, they could learn from the mixed performance of Eddy Shah’s mid-market Today which had been launched seven months earlier in March 1986. They certainly would not be seeking to reproduce the technological hiccups that marred Today’s early editions. The Independent was not, in any case, troubled by Today’s position in the newspaper market since its own primary focus was to gain disaffected readers from the three main broadsheets. The far greater stroke of good fortune was Murdoch’s Wapping revolution that (coincidentally) got underway shortly after Whittam Smith, Glover and Symonds announced their own intentions to launch their paper. By destroying the bargaining power of the print unions and clearing the way for the introduction of new technology, Murdoch slashed the cost of starting up rival newspapers. In consequence, the Independent was launched on the back of a mere £18 million with a £3 million overdraft. This was less than a third of the start-up cost of the Mail on Sunday in the pre-Wapping environment of 1982.[2] In common with Today, the Independent contracted its printing out to four (later three) separate companies. Although these still employed union labour, the Independent refused to employ any print union members itself, despite the attempts of the NGA to secure a roll in electronic page make-up. As if reducing the cost base and dismantling the union stranglehold was not enough, Murdoch’s Wapping battle assisted the Independent in a further, more negative, respect. The hardships and ill feelings created by having to work in siege conditions behind barbed wire and the scorn of other journalists ensured that there was a ready supply of disaffected Times and Sunday Times journalists looking to be tempted into Whittam Smith’s feathered perch.

All national newspapers have a continual turnaround of staff but during the Wapping strike the number seeking to depart increased sharply. The first wave bore up the dozen refuseniks who had declined to cross the picket line from the first. They were soon augmented by a continuous trickle of those who subsequently found the courage of their convictions (especially when there were other journalistic jobs offered them) and by those who hated the torment of crossing a battle zone every day to get into work and saw no immediate likelihood of peace breaking out. Wilson was a galvanizing and inspiring figure whose personal courage was recognized by all those who saw him work to bring the newspaper out under the trying conditions of a vicious siege. He was not always so good at recognizing that many members of staff were less keen to spoil for a fight. This was evident from his upbeat assessment that working from behind the wire at Wapping ‘had about as much effect as whether or not it was raining’ for the life and work of the journalists trapped there.[3] Even for those content to be spat on while making their way through the front gate to work, Wilson’s fighting talk was clearly overoptimistic. The Labour Party’s refusal even to talk to Times journalists and the wariness with which many of those of a left liberal sensibility treated those associated, however indirectly, with Rupert Murdoch did make journalists’ lives more difficult. In the first six months of the Wapping siege, 150 journalists left the four News International titles based there. More than thirty of them had worked for The Times. When in June 1986 the company placed an advertisement in the UK Press Gazette soliciting applications for ‘opportunities for general and specialist writers and production staff to add to our success’[4] the appeal read rather more like a desperate plea.

Among the Wapping refuseniks, the loss of Paul Routledge was the highest-profile casualty. Routledge had not wanted to resign, telling the press that he had always had ‘a strong feeling for The Times. It was the paper I always wanted to work for, and I still do.’[5] But he resolutely obeyed the NUJ’s instructions not to work at – or file to – Wapping until the dispute was settled on satisfactory terms. Wilson was reluctant to sack him. Instead Routledge was suspended without pay but with modest expenses to sustain him at his posting in Singapore where Douglas-Home had installed him as South East Asia correspondent. The dispute’s prolongation frayed tempers and when Routledge, having left Singapore without permission, chanced to see a Tamil Tiger outrage at Colombo airport and filed an eyewitness report for the Observer, Wilson’s patience snapped.[6] Sacked, Routledge proceeded to heckle former colleagues on their way into Wapping, an act that cost him several friendships. After toying with working for Maxwell’s short-lived London Daily News, he defected to the Observer where The Times Diary editor, Angela Gordon, had also set up shop.

It was the number of his journalists being poached by the Independent even before it had been launched that especially worried Wilson. Why were they leaving good jobs on one of the world’s most famous newspapers for positions on a paper that did not yet even exist? At Easter, Wilson managed to escape with his family for a brief holiday in Lanzarotte, the first break he had felt able to take in eighteen bruising months. No sooner had he arrived than Mike Hoy, the managing editor, started telephoning him to say defections to the Independent were beginning in earnest. By the Friday of his supposedly relaxing family holiday, nine had departed. That day, Wilson was distracted from his sun lounger by a call from the proprietor. ‘Hi, Rupert, how are you?’ he said, vainly trying to sound upbeat. A growl down the line answered, ‘Frustrated. Frustrated because you’re there and I’m here.’[7] Murdoch had arrived at Wapping to find his editor absent and the office filled with rumours of defections. It looked bad.

In the end, seventeen Times journalists directly defected. Wilson was not concerned by some of the departures, but he was sorry to lose Anthony Bevins, the political correspondent who had been an important factor in The Times’s Westminster reporting since 1981. Bevins’s leaving was not a surprise (he had clashed with Wilson over the paper’s anti-Heseltine handling of the Westland crisis) but it was a disappointment. An LSE-educated Liverpudlian, he was the son of Harold Macmillan’s Postmaster-General. (Reginald Bevins had been the only working-class member in that Government and had put up with a lot of condescension for his troubles.) This treatment and two years of voluntary work in Bengal had given Tony Bevins a valuable sense of detachment from the ruling few. His dogged style had been a boon to The Times and his disrespect for the hypocrisies of the lobby system and its non-attributable briefings ensured he fitted in well as the first political editor of the Independent. There, he was reunited with the former Times industrial affairs staff, Don McIntyre, David Felton and Barrie Clement, all of whom had opted to refuse to work at Wapping from the first. Wilson was deeply concerned when told that Miles Kington was also thinking of defecting to the Independent. He personally met him at the airport and whisked him away for lunch at the Savoy Grill as a desperate ploy to dissuade him. He failed. After nearly six years of writing his ‘Moreover’ column five times a week for the paper, it was the first time Kington had actually met Wilson.[8]

There were other high-profile defections. The fashion editor, Suzy Menkes, departed for the Independent. Sarah Hogg, the economics editor for the past three years, left to become the new paper’s business and finance editor. She told Wilson that she had not felt she was part of his inner circle. Married to the Tory politician Douglas Hogg, she later became head of the Downing Street Policy Unit to John Major in 1990. In truth, Wilson’s inner circle was momentarily contracting. Colin Webb announced his intention to resign the deputy editorship in order to become editor-in-chief of the Press Association. With Webb’s departure, Wilson decided to create two deputy editors. One was Peter Stothard who had fulfilled the promise that his mentor, Harold Evans, had first detected in him. His priorities continued to be comment and leading articles. The other was John Bryant. This was an appointment that led to a marked cooling in relations between Wilson and Mike Hoy who, until that moment, had worked amicably with Wilson and might have thought himself a contender for the post. Bryant, however, proved to be an excellent choice. Brought up in the West Country and grammar school-educated, he was, like Wilson, a highly professional ‘news man’ who, following an apprenticeship at the Edinburgh Evening News, had worked at the Daily Mail. Both editor and deputy shared a love of sport. While Wilson loved racing, Bryant was an Oxford athletics Blue and a close friend of Roger Bannister, Christopher Chataway and many of the great figures of British track and field. Knowing that Bryant was trying to extract himself from the Mail in order to join the Independent, Wilson acted fast to bring him to Wapping instead.

While Bryant would prove a worthy replacement for Webb, it was a bad time for Wilson to be falling out with other members of staff. Whatever the bullish persona he attempted to portray on the outside, Wilson was privately deeply worried about the imminent launch of the Independent. He knew that Wapping and its accompanying violence had tarnished The Times’s image and that Murdoch – painted as an editorially interfering monster by rival newspapers – was the unspoken target of the Independent’s title and advertising campaign. It was annoying, given the extent to which Murdoch’s Wapping revolution had made the self-regarding ingénue possible, but there was never likely to be much love lost in the circumstances of a circulation war. Bruce Matthews told Wilson he was overreacting.[9] Many industry insiders still thought the new newspaper would quickly implode. The Financial Times’s Raymond Snoddy predicted ‘Rupert Murdoch will strangle it in its cot before it gets a chance to wave its rattle’.[10]

II

When the Guardian’s editor, Peter Preston, held the first edition of the Independent in his hands he breathed a sign of relief and observed, ‘It looks a bit like The Times of five years ago.’ It was rather as he had suspected. In April 1986, John Biffen, the Leader of the Commons, had told a lunch held by Guardian editorial staff that he had been the guest to lunch at The Times the previous week. They had been apprehensive about the Independent’s launch although they had no need to be while he found the Guardian laid back even though they ought not to be.[11] In the event, Preston’s first response was both right and wrong. He was wrong to be relaxed about it. Within eighteen months of the Independent’s launch, the Guardian had lost 10 per cent of its market. By 1988 the new rival had, from nothing, come to within 100,000 of the Guardian’s diminishing 474,000 circulation. Yet, Preston was right to the extent that it had the feel (although with far better print reproduction) of William Rees-Mogg’s Times. Those who preferred that product were part of its new market and this was a worrying development for Wilson. The attack on The Times’s territory came not only in the breadth of the Independent’s foreign reporting (with twelve correspondents posted around the globe) but also in the strength of its obituaries and law reports. Many Times journalists resented Rees-Mogg’s decision to be an Independent columnist, seeing it as a slap in the face to his old paper. Others thought it an indictment not on the past editor but on the current paper.

Inevitably, the Independent could not keep all the readers that turned to it out of curiosity on its first day. By November, its sales had fallen back to 275,000. The Times had lost about ten thousand copies since the arrival of the new competitor and was selling 478,000 a day.[12] In the circumstances, the old paper was holding up surprisingly well against the new, making some of the criticisms of Wilson’s editorship appear disingenuous. Wilson, too, began to regain his confidence. He felt the Independent’s refusal to report on the monarchy was an own goal – ‘well, for Times readers that’s a nonsense!’[13] The Independent’s founders believed the Telegraph had weaknesses and that they could take a large share of its readers. It was easy to understand why they worked on this assumption. Not only had their own experience of working at the Telegraph made them especially aware of its shortcomings, the statistics markedly pointed to its vulnerability. Between 1980 and 1986, the Telegraph had lost almost 300,000 readers while The Times had added 172,000 and the Guardian 150,000. Vast though the Telegraph’s circulation might be, it was one that was visibly ebbing with each month that passed. Oddly, this was the respect in which Whittam Smith, Glover and Symonds miscalculated. The Telegraph proceeded to suffer the fewest losses to the new paper. Indeed, by the time of the Independent’s first birthday, the Telegraph’s circulation was actually higher than it had been twelve months previously. The FT was also undamaged. It was Peter Preston who had the least grounds for passing on birthday congratulations. The crusade for the centre and centre-left readership proved to be the real battleground and it was from the Guardian that the Independent made the most gains.

This assault on the Guardian had at least one bonus for The Times – it allowed it to overtake the Guardian’s circulation and move into second place in the daily broadsheet market. But the Independent’s strengths were there for all to see and few were surprised when it won the What The Papers Say ‘Newspaper of the Year’ award. Aside from the quality of the prose, the design was also crisp. The photographs were by far the best of any newspaper even if there was some truth in Wilson’s observation that an addiction to brooding clouds meant they could be described as ‘an accumulation of cumulus’. After celebrating its first birthday, its sales began to surge forward again and by late 1988 it was heading towards 400,000. The Guardian and The Times were now within reach.

The Independent’s success was phenomenal. By the spring of 1988 it was making a profit (something The Times had proved incapable of sustaining in a century of trying to get it right) and it was even in a position to repay half of the £18 million with which it had been launched. Two years after the Independent’s arrival, The Times’s sale was still down 32,000 and the Guardian had slid 82,000. The Times, however, faced another threat that was less worrying to the Guardian. Conrad Black’s Daily Telegraph, led by an aggressive editor, Max Hastings, and Andrew Knight’s management team, was taking the painful medicine that the previous Hartwell ownership, without the salutary threat of a Wapping manoeuvre, had felt unable to administer. At last it had managed to cut almost 2400 print union employees and reap the benefit of the investment in new presses in Docklands. During 1987, the Telegraph moved out of danger, declaring a £580,000 pre-tax profit. The following year its profitability soared to £29 million. Meanwhile, in 1988, the Guardian showed it too had awoken to the need to adapt to survive with a redesign that featured a new, distinctive, sans-serif typeface. The improvement in its appearance was marked, although there was no immediate reward in circulation gains, despite the decision of its three rivals, including The Times, to increase their sale prices from twenty-five to thirty pence.

New print works, fewer print workers, the regaining of management’s right to manage and a boom in advertising revenue on the back of the economic recovery drove the national newspapers’ surge into profitability in 1987 and 1988. In the year following Murdoch’s commencement of the Wapping revolution, the profits of the Mirror Group doubled, the Express trebled and even the long-troubled FT, ‘the pink ’un’, announced it was £40 million in the black. The pundits had argued that the Wapping revolution’s consequence would be to increase the number of newspapers, but in the immediate aftermath, only Today and the Independent survived (in the case of Today because it was bought and saved by Murdoch), while the Sunday Today, the left-wing News on Sunday and Maxwell’s London Daily News all suffered cot deaths. Yet, the market did increase, with a net rise of newspaper sales. The Independent in particular managed to generate sales to customers who had previously avoided the broadsheet market. Thanks largely to Whittam Smith’s brainchild, the broadsheet market expanded by 11 per cent at the expense of the mid-market titles.

Easily overlooked amid the tumults of congratulation about its journalism, the Independent made one serious error from the first: it failed to pursue classified advertising, which was essential to help balance its books. Initially, it only employed six people to attract classified ads.[14] This was madness. The market had jumped 20 per cent in the first six months of 1987. An opportunity to lure business away from the Guardian (which, with its attraction to the public sector, led the classified market) was squandered. Advertising revenue also poured into The Times. Assisted by the new flexibility offered by Wapping, it was able to add advert-driven supplements with relative ease. It was an area in which The Times found itself let off the hook by its new rival. Later, in 1990, at the moment when his paper was poised to overtake The Times’s circulation, Whittam Smith would make a far more serious commercial error. By venturing into the Sunday market he would shake the financial foundations of the company, inflict great damage on his original creation and give The Times an opportunity to make good its escape. All this, however, looked an improbable outcome in 1988.

III

The scale of the Conservatives’ 1983 election landslide and the manner in which Margaret Thatcher conducted her Cabinet were not conducive to an active parliamentary scene. Yet, Westminster reporting remained a central aspect of The Times’s political coverage. Much of the work continued to be done by the team scribbling in shorthand the transactions of the lower chamber from the Press Gallery. This was not the only vantage point. The paper’s onsite office was a cabin, precariously but perfectly perched on the roof of the Palace of Westminster, between the clock tower of Big Ben and the Commons chamber and accessible only by passing through the Press Bar.

In April 1985, the blast at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine pushed the safety of the nuclear power industry sharply towards the top of the political agenda. In Britain, the Sizewell and Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plants were already a focus of concern. In December 1985, a member of the all-party Commons Select Committee on the Environment leaked to Richard Evans, a new Times lobby reporter, the draft of its chairman’s report on the disposal sites for radioactive waste. It stated that the sites were ‘primitive in the extreme’. Evans wrote up the story and it was published on 16 December. It informed readers that the Report expressed such ‘deep reservations’ about the handling of spent nuclear fuel ‘that the basis of the processing operation must be called into question’.[15] There was an outcry, but for The Times the most serious response came from within the Palace of Westminster. In their private deliberations and proceedings, select committees enjoyed parliamentary privilege. This, Evans had knowingly breached. At Westminster, there was a strong view that he and the paper for which he worked should be punished.

Preparing to face the storm, Evans enjoyed the full backing of his editor and of the Press Council. The Times pleaded the well-worn journalistic justification of acting in the public interest. Although it was true that rules had been broken, they were ‘now almost invariably unused and in general disrepute’ the leading article argued. The Times was striking a blow against ‘archaic, self-serving secrecy’.[16] As far as both John Biffen, Leader of the Commons, and his Labour shadow, Peter Shore, were concerned, it was The Times that was being self-serving. By printing the leak, it had undermined the confidentiality that was essential to the private deliberations of select committees. The atmosphere in which the committees’ members, coming from the various political parties, could examine evidence impartially had been damaged. Furthermore, it was not up to a newspaper to decide which parliamentary rules to obey or what constituted public interest. How was the public interest served by publishing a draft report when two weeks later the official report could have been analysed? The once reliable Times, it was argued, had been indulging in nothing more lofty that the commercial self-interest of a ‘scoop’. In May 1986, the parliamentary Committee of Privileges voted (with only one vote against, that of Tony Benn) to recommend Evans’s expulsion from the Commons for six months and to prevent The Times from replacing him because of its ‘serious contempt of the House’.[17] It would be the first time such a punishment had been carried out since 1832.

To The Times, the reaction appeared disproportionate. The point of publishing the draft rather than waiting for the published version was to show how strong the original fears were before they were potentially watered down – possibly for political reasons – for the final version. Since it was an MP who had been responsible for the original leak, it could be maintained that the Privileges Committee would have been better searching more closely for the perpetrator rather than seeking revenge on a young journalist, a case, if ever there was one, of shooting the messenger. On 20 May, the Commons debated the Privileges Committee’s recommendations. Sir Ian Gilmour and Michael Foot provided strong support for The Times’s case, demanding to know why it was acceptable for journalists to try to discover what went on in Cabinet meetings but not in the deliberations of select committees. The House agreed, dividing by 154 to 124 not to enforce the ban on Evans and The Times. Significantly, Margaret Thatcher, the party chairman Norman Tebbit, and four other Cabinet ministers voted against punishment.[18] This led some conspiracy theorist to ponder whether the Prime Minister wanted not only to keep in with The Times but that she was also keen to trim the burgeoning authority of select committees’ scrutiny of the Government.[19]

The Prime Minister certainly was in need of all the Fleet Street friends she could muster. Michael Heseltine, the Defence Secretary, had emerged as the most flamboyant and charismatic figure in the Cabinet. That he was no Thatcherite and had developed an alternative philosophy that borrowed from Japanese corporatism and emphasized the need to regenerate inner cities made him an ideological as well as a personal challenger for the leadership. Whenever the Prime Minister appeared vulnerable to the possibility of electoral defeat, Tory faint hearts began to contemplate turning for salvation to the Defence Secretary instead. The conflict came to a head over his opposition to the efforts of the American company Sikorsky in its bid for a sizeable stake in Westland Helicopters. Heseltine favoured a European consortium and, when Mrs Thatcher demanded he seek Cabinet Office approval before restating earlier pronouncements on Westland’s future, he dramatically walked out in the middle of a Cabinet meeting.

The Times was sceptical from the first over Heseltine’s role in opposing the Sikorsky bid (which was later accepted by the company’s shareholders). Contrasting his attitude with his gung-ho display against CND campaigners at a cruise missile base, The Times noted that, ‘the flak-jacketed hero of Molesworth was not as determinedly pro-American as he appeared’.[20] Even before his resignation, the paper’s editorial line had cast doubt on his conduct and motives: ‘It is hard to escape gracefully from Mrs Thatcher’s shadow but it is a journey which all aspiring successors will have to take at some time. The party will prefer not to choose its new organ grinder from its old monkeys and Mr Heseltine knows it.’[21] Three days later he made his dramatic Cabinet walkout. The resulting crisis found the editor and his chief political correspondent at loggerheads. Tony Bevins had developed good contacts with Heseltine and on the news of his resignation assured Wilson, ‘She’s finished.’ Wilson begged to differ. Bevins resented his judgment being dismissed in this fashion and his differences with the paper widened. Surprisingly, Heseltine took heart from The Times’s leading article on his resignation, claiming in his memoirs, ‘it comes as close as any newspaper of such authority ever would to supporting what a rebel minister had done’.[22] The article, entitled ‘A Very Good Resignation’, was actually referring to why his walkout might be good for his own leadership chances, rather than endorsing his attempts to interfere in Westland’s future ownership.[23] The Times was far from being ready to abandon the Prime Minister, preferring instead to shift the blame onto her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, and the Trade and Industry Secretary, Leon Brittan, who leaked a letter by the Solicitor General referring to ‘material inaccuracies’ in Heseltine’s case against Sikorsky. The leading column called on Brittan to resign in order to save Mrs Thatcher’s blushes and when he did so (later that day following a hostile meeting of the backbench 1922 Committee) commented dismissively, ‘unlike Mr Heseltine, he has not left a political hole around the cabinet table. And like Mr Heseltine he has no well-prepared hole in the backbenches to which he can rest.’[24] The immediate consequence, though, was that Mrs Thatcher had seen off her most deadly internal enemy – at any rate, for the time being.

By then, Julian Haviland, the paper’s political editor, had already departed (he subsequently helped ghost Heseltine’s Where There’s A Will) while the paper’s failure to get behind the Tory Jacobite challenger brought forward Tony Bevins’s defection to the Independent. Philip Webster was promoted to chief political correspondent, Ivan Barnes became parliamentary editor and Robin Oakley became political editor.

Oakley had spent his childhood in Northern Rhodesia (subsequently Zambia) where his father was a civil engineer. At prep school in Surrey and at Wellington College in the 1950s he had dabbled in amateur dramatics and athletics (a back injury blighted his otherwise promising javelin throwing). At Brasenose College, Oxford, in the early sixties he had also followed the horses and, enjoyed a flutter (a passion he would subsequently share with Charles Wilson). It was the desire to gain experience away from London and the Home Counties that led him to turn down a job with the Thomson Group in favour of a graduate traineeship as a subeditor in the Liverpool Daily Post where he found himself working alongside Tony Bevins and John Sergeant. He became a parliamentary lobby correspondent for the paper in 1967, moving to the ‘Crossbencher’ column of the Sunday Express three years later which involved mixing and liquid lunching with his political informants. It was also his first experience of working under an invective-peddling Scotsman (John Junor) as editor. Between 1981 and 1986 he found himself working under another strong editor in the shape of David English at the Daily Mail. Oakley had built up a reputation as a Westminster insider who was noted for his non-partisan skills as a straight reporter. As such, he began to feel that too long an association with the outspoken Daily Mail was damaging his deserved reputation for impartiality. He leapt at the opportunity to succeed Julian Haviland when Wilson offered it to him over breakfast at the Waldorf in September 1986. ‘I had dreamed of being Political Editor of The Times since my starting days on the Liverpool Daily Post’, Oakley later recalled, adding that it was ‘one of the best jobs in British journalism’.[25]

Unlike Bevins, Oakley valued the workings of the ‘lobby’. The term took its name from the members’ lobby in the House of Commons where a select group of journalists was permitted to enter and approach or be approached by parliamentary contacts. Talking on ‘lobby terms’ meant that the conversation was, for the purposes of a newspaper report, non-attributable. For this reason, note taking was discouraged. Lobby correspondents were a small proportion of the total number of parliamentary journalists and, naturally, their privileges generated suspicion. Critics believed The Lobby operated as an exclusive club in which favoured journalists became part of the process by which politicians manipulated the media. One fear was that they were told information in return for pulling punches. In fact, soliciting in the members’ lobby was only one means of sharing insider information. Another principal source was the Downing Street press office, led by Bernard Ingham, which provided twice daily non-attributable briefings to political correspondents. The Independent and the Guardian withdrew from these, believing that they were designed more to mislead than illuminate. The Times, however, continued to make the most of the existing channels. Oakley believed that so long as journalists were tenacious in cross-referencing what they were told, the press office was important and that the newspapers that had excluded themselves from Ingham’s briefings wasted a lot of time catching up with what had been discussed there. Furthermore, if such briefings did not exist officially, they would inevitably manifest themselves unofficially – and with even less accountability. Indeed, the great benefit of the lobby system was that it allowed MPs of all parties to plant information in newspapers without being identified as the source. Critics regarded this as another invitation to mischief making in which self-interested individuals could bend the ear of a journalist without taking the personal responsibility of making the statement themselves. Inevitably, the device of ‘Lobby Terms’ was most useful to those MPs who wanted to harm a fellow politician or policy from within their own party. Wilson’s successor, Simon Jenkins, was wary about having The Times quote disparaging remarks about individuals without quoting the source and, consequently, this practice was cut back.[26] Oakley, however, believed that if attribution were mandatory, politicians would be far more guarded – and less honest – in their conversations with journalists. The result would be a newspaper with diminished responsiveness to the political undercurrents and the creation of a barrier between politicians and journalists in which conversation was restricted to press statements and platitudes.

In October 1986 the Conservatives analysed polling evidence that suggested the public believed the Government was running out of steam. They responded with a variety of new initiates with which to go into the following year’s general election. Rearranging the provision of local services was at the core. They put forward proposals to allow schools to opt out of local authority control and council tenants to choose private-sector landlords. Rates, the property-based tax levied by local government, would be replaced by a poll tax of the whole electorate. The privatization programme would also continue, the water and electricity utilities being next for sale. In December, The Times started planning for an assumed general election in either the following May or October. In the event, Mrs Thatcher announced that she would go to the country on 11 June. First there would be the endurance test of a month on the campaign trail.

One who was not surprised by the timing of the election was Robin Oakley. With Labour highlighting Britain’s social and economic divisions, he pointed out that ‘Mrs Thatcher was determined to rob Labour of the chance of exploiting the conspicuous consumption at the Ascot race meeting in the week of June 18’. This was not as frivolous an observation as might be imagined. The emergence of the young upwardly mobile professional – or yuppie – had become the cultural phenomenon of a period of rising salaries and house prices. It was not just socialists who regarded them with loathing. Bizarrely, The Times got involved in a spat with Peregrine Worsthorne, the elegant apostle of High Toryism and editor of the Sunday Telegraph, who accused the Conservatives of supporting this ‘bourgeois triumphalism’. A Times leading article written by Peter Stothard was incredulous, noting, ‘It has been remarkable how a few young men have only to make a few hundred thousand pounds in the City and spend it on youthful pleasures for people to start saying that we are witnessing a dangerous exhibition of “bourgeois triumphalism”.’ Worsthorne responded by writing to The Times to condemn it for not urging Mrs Thatcher to disassociate herself from such displays.[27] In its manifestation of heady optimism and growing opportunity – without yet a sense of noblesse oblige – Worsthorne had identified the fresh energies that Thatcherism was unleashing. It was certainly a force knocking upon the doors of a closed Establishment and, contrary to its past reputation, The Times had become more sympathetic towards prising the portals open. The paper’s 1950s advertising slogan, ‘Top People Take The Times’ had come in for much pillorying over the years. But its less well-remembered follow-up, ‘Tomorrow’s Top People Take The Times’, now appeared strangely prescient.

With or without the help of the yuppies, the Tories could point to some favourable statistics. Unemployment had fallen continuously for seventeen months (the figure was tantalizingly close to dipping below three million, which it did on the week after the election), there was a public-spending surplus and manufacturing output had struggled back to where it had been in 1979. According to taste, these statistics were either evidence of policies that were working or of how many years they had failed to bear much fruit. Whatever the debate, the Tories went into the month of campaigning with a twelve-point lead in the opinion polls.

With Kinnock at the helm, Labour would not repeat the catastrophe of the 1983 manifesto that was famously dubbed ‘the longest suicide note in history’. But Labour went into the 1987 contest as the tax and spend party nonetheless. There were commitments to reverse Nigel Lawson’s tax cuts (at a time when the upper rate of income tax had still not been reduced below 60 per cent) and to introduce a wealth tax. The party was also still committed to the dismantling of private education (though it was debatable whether outright abolition would be achieved during the life of the next Parliament). The machinery of State planning would also be re-erected with a pledge to reduce unemployment by one million within two years and to create a National Economic Summit to identify what action Government, employees and unions needed to take to plan for future investment and price control. Unhelpfully, Christopher Walker, reporting from Moscow, pointed out that Denis Healey, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, had emerged from a Soviet briefing to announce that his atheist hosts were ‘praying’ for a Labour victory.[28]

As the campaign progressed, the Tories proved vulnerable on health issues as did Labour on defence policy and the behaviour of the so-called ‘loony left’. With two leaders, David Steel and David Owen (the latter experiencing tense relations with his senior SDP colleagues), the Alliance’s greatest problem concerned how to give the misleading impression of unity. Yet, with the exception of one rogue blip, the opinion polls continued to show the Conservatives remained within the electoral comfort zone of above 40 per cent of the popular vote. From a news perspective, the apparent predictability of the result risked diminishing the drama. George Hill subsequently described it as ‘a dull campaign, where the main rivalry was between promotional agencies out to win fame and fortune’.[29] As part of the marketing exercise, the pages of The Times were bombarded with full-page adverts promoting the Tories’ negative campaign slogan ‘Britain’s Booming, Don’t Let Labour Wreck It’. Labour won the artistic plaudits with an election broadcast dubbed ‘Kinnock the Movie’, although some thought it too presidential. After Michael Foot’s amateurish style of electioneering in 1983, the party had certainly improved its media presentation. The handiwork of Peter Mandelson, two years into his post as director of communications, was beginning to show itself.

Nonetheless, when it came to cajoling the press, there was still much to be learned from the Tories. Having secured interviews with the other party leaders, Oakley was alarmed when Conservative Central Office suddenly decided his interview with Mrs Thatcher could not be squeezed in. This was an extraordinary slap in the face to the newspaper. ‘I cashed every outstanding cheque I had at the top of the Tory Party in my efforts to secure the interview’, Oakley subsequently wrote. Lord Young eventually managed to get him a twenty-minute slot with the Prime Minister on Monday 8 June. But that very morning Downing Street took umbrage at The Times’s front page which featured a photograph of Neil and Glenys Kinnock waving at crowds and a variety of (to Tory eyes) doom and gloom headlines. Young telephoned Oakley and Wilson to say The Times was doing Labour’s propaganda for it and the interview was cancelled. As attempts went to bully and manipulate the press, this was pretty unsophisticated. A heated exchange on the telephone ended with the interview being reinstated. Yet, if Mrs Thatcher’s heavies hoped The Times would atone for its apostasy they were to be disappointed. When Oakley eventually got to sit down with the Prime Minister, he risked her wrath by following one of her long-winded answers with a demand that, given the short time available, she should keep her answers brief and to the point.[30] The resulting dialogue appeared in The Times on election day.

Besides the reporting of Robin Oakley and Philip Webster, The Times’s electoral coverage was enlivened by Craig Brown’s sketch writing and lengthier pieces by Barbara Amiel who forwarded her dispatches from Mrs Thatcher’s battle bus. As on previous occasions, the focus was not just on policies but also about what was happening in the swing marginal constituencies. Whether Shirley Williams would take Cambridge for the Alliance became a source of intense interest. Few were in any doubt for which party The Times’s leading column would declare the paper’s allegiance, but its Op-Ed could not be faulted for the spectrum of regular columnists: starting with Ben Pimlott on the left and moving through Jo Grimond, Conor Cruise O’Brien and John Grigg towards T. E Utley and Woodrow Wyatt on the right. As with 1983, The Times was fortunate to make use of the doyen of academic psephologists, David Butler of Nuffield College, Oxford. Professor Butler advised on statistical analysis, providing Op-Ed articles and writing short features as well as assisting with the resulting Times House of Commons guidebook to the new Parliament.

How much effect the reporting of The Times and its rivals had on shaping the electorate’s minds was hard to gauge. Television news certainly claimed the limelight. In 1983, only 8 per cent of the public had stated they believed the press provided the most unbiased and complete election coverage. In contrast, 54 per cent thought television provided the most unbiased and 60 per cent the most complete reporting. Although the trend was scarcely new, there was little doubt that newspapers were failing to set the news agenda. Another cerebral pundit hired by The Times for the election, Dennis Kavanagh, Professor of Politics at Nottingham University, pointed out that the campaign agenda was largely set on The Jimmy Young Show and Election Call. By comparison, the 9.30 a.m. press conferences succeeded only in producing what was stale news by the time it was regurgitated on newspaper front pages the following morning.

As far as Labour was concerned, the prioritizing of television and radio over the print media was understandable given the level of savagery meted out by many of the tabloids and mid-market papers. The Times was one of the eleven national newspapers that endorsed the Conservatives. Seven opposed Thatcher. The FT and the Independent opted not to endorse any party. The FT’s stance was perhaps the most surprising – especially given that research by MORI suggested that it was the paper with the highest proportion of Tory voters (78 per cent). MORI’s polling suggested that 69 per cent of Daily Telegraph readers had gone on to vote Conservative, as had 59 per cent of Times readers and only just half of Sun readers. The Alliance’s support among Times readers had slipped from 33 per cent in 1983 to 28 per cent. Meanwhile, Today, which argued the Alliance’s cause, had convinced only a third of its readers of the two Davids’ charms – a proportion comparable to the Thatcher-cheerleading Daily Mail (and also the agnostic Independent whose readers were split almost equally between the three main parties).[31] These figures certainly suggested readers were governed first by their own perceptions and not those of the editorial conference.

On election night, The Times was able to speed its reporting with technology that had been denied it in 1983. Back then, NGA members had rekeyed in the results from each constituency from the details provided from the PA. For the 1987 election, the paper was free to use a computerized system that processed the statistics automatically as they came in and was able to provide instant extrapolations on swings and turn them into bar and pie charts. The Saturday Times contained a sixteen-page guide to the results in full with short profiles of all the MPs elected. Supporting commentary and analysis were provided by David Butler and Bob Worcester of MORI.

The Conservatives were returned to office with a majority of 101. The Times’s headline declared it ‘Thatcher’s historic victory’.[32] No previous Prime Minister had won three general elections in succession. It was also the first time the Conservatives had gained a majority of working class votes. This was particularly impressive since economic change was shrinking the working class back to its traditional manual-labouring core. The 2 per cent swing towards Labour in England was remarkably mild given the post-Falklands conditions in which the previous election had been fought. However, the 7.5 per cent swing in Scotland portended trouble ahead north of the border. Oakley concluded sagaciously, ‘Ministers will be anxious to know how much that has to do with the introduction of the “community charge” poll tax in Scotland which they have pledged to introduce in England and Wales too.’[33]

The 1987 general election was a disaster for the Alliance and for the SDP in particular. They had entered the year with hope; in February their candidate Rosie Barnes had won a much-publicized by-election that ended a half-century Labour Party tenancy in Greenwich. But the general election was another matter. With defeats for Bill Rodgers at Milton Keynes, Shirley Williams in Cambridge and Roy Jenkins to the left-wing firebrand George Galloway in Glasgow Hillhead, the Gang of Four was now, in parliamentary terms, a gang of one – David Owen. Only four other junior SDP members joined him on the Commons benches. Kinnock’s attempts to isolate the hard left had at least succeeded in undermining the point of the ‘soft-left’ SDP. The Liberals had made no headway and continued to be the party of the rural West Country and the Celtic fringe, although with seventeen MPs they were clearly the senior party in the Alliance. Unlike David Steel, the Liberal leader, David Owen opposed the post-battle prognosis for merger between the two parties. His own members disagreed, and when in August they voted for a merger, Owen resigned and took with him an SDP rump. The divisions within the centre ground were laid bare. From his column in The Times, Ben Pimlott described an ‘Alliance self-mutilation more pathological than anything witnessed in the Labour Party at the start of the decade’. It was not a pretty spectacle, particularly since it involved those who had so frequently condemned the ‘adversarial politics’ of the old two party system.[34] After a succession of votes and confusions over what the new name would be (LSD was ruled out for obvious reasons while SLD was soon found to be – in the words of the comedian Rory Bremner – ‘not so much a party, more a poor hand at Scrabble’) Paddy Ashdown became leader of what was eventually decided would be called the Liberal Democrats. The change of name and leader did not work any spellbinding magic. The opinion polls during 1988 and 1990 suggested the party was struggling to attract 10 per cent support. Owen, meanwhile, stumbled on with his own SDP rump, the once bright hope of democratic socialism reduced to the sidelines of British politics. He finally wound up his SDP group in June 1990 after it won fewer votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party at a by-election in Bootle.

IV

A third term of office and a booming economy gave the Conservatives considerable latitude to enact their programme. Charles Wilson considered his relations with the Prime Minister were ‘very good’ but they were hardly close and he was a less frequent visitor to Chequers than Douglas-Home had been. In all the period of his editorship, Wilson only spoke to Mrs Thatcher once on the telephone and, although he saw her at some stage most months, this was invariably at a public function in which lengthy private conversation was difficult.[35] Murdoch, his journeys to Britain becoming increasingly infrequent due to the demands of his growing American empire, found he saw Mrs Thatcher little more than once a year.[36] If Britain was being run, as many hostile commentators alleged, by a Thatcher – Murdoch axis then it could only have been coordinated through telepathy.

The interrelation between Downing Street and the press that did exist was primarily conducted between the Prime Minister’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, and Fleet Street’s principal reporters. As political editor, Robin Oakley was The Times man who saw most of Mrs Thatcher. Not only did he stalk Westminster’s corridors, he and the rest of the press pack followed the Prime Minister around the world in the back of her RAF VC-10. It was often a punishing schedule, although it rarely appeared to take much out of Mrs Thatcher who always rose to the occasion for those straining for a glimpse of the Iron Lady. On one occasion in March 1987 on a trip for talks with Gorbachev, she had first gone to light a candle for peace at the Zagorsk monastery near Moscow. Stopping first to visit a Moscow supermarket she bought bread and pilchards. Huge crowds of sturdy Russians pressed around her. Oakley overheard one British diplomat murmuring, ‘loaves and little fishes … surely not?’.

Back at home, the general election victory in 1987 had revitalized the Government’s reforming agenda. Improving choice in public-sector provision was the theme of the modernizers in the Cabinet and health and education were the main targets. The 1988 Education Act transformed Britain’s schools. It created a national curriculum. With the establishment of a funding per capita formula, headmasters and governors gained control of school budgets. Local governments’ powers to determine or restrict the size of schools diminished. Preventing local authorities from placing pupils in specified schools widened the scope for parental choice. Schools were permitted to opt out of local authority altogether and become grant-maintained schools funded directly from Whitehall. The widely derided Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) was abolished. New specialist academies, to be called City Technology Colleges, were established. These measures were guided by two principles. The first was that power and funding should be shifted away from local authorities and towards schools and parental choice. The second was that central government should play an enhanced role, not only in ensuring a unified curriculum but also as schools’ direct financer. In practice, far fewer schools opted out than the Government had hoped and the elite City Technology Colleges, although successful, proved also to be few in number. The Government’s centralizing tendency was widely deplored by those who continued to put their faith in town hall democracy. But the measures had also devolved power to the schools and to parents who now found they had far greater flexibility in choosing their child’s education. For this choice to be an informed one, it was necessary to provide them with statistics that demonstrated the varying performances of the institutions in the area. The Times’s attempts to provide parents with the information was at first slow and public school-orientated, with the serializing of the Harper & Queen’s Good Schools Guide. However on 22 June 1987, the education correspondent, John Clare, launched The Times Good University Guide, commencing a process that would eventually include schools as well, once more reliable information was made available upon which to base the evidence.

These reforms came amidst what briefly looked like an economic miracle. Britain was experiencing the ‘Lawson Boom’. Unemployment had finally fallen below three million and continued to plunge. House prices were soaring. Yet the strict monetarism deployed by Sir Geoffrey Howe, Lawson’s predecessor at the Treasury, had been quietly jettisoned now that inflation was under control. The Medium Term Financial Strategy (MTFS) that Howe (and Lawson, who was then Financial Secretary) had originally devised had made M3, the broad measure of the money supply, rather than the exchange rate, the key indicator in the control of inflation. However, M3 targets were easier to set than to adhere to and financial deregulation made it, in any case, a spurious measurement. In the autumn of 1986, the Treasury effectively abandoned M3 targeting in favour of concentrating on a new exchange rate policy based upon shadowing the Deutschmark. Interest rates went down in the 1988 Budget, encouraging the credit boom further and, ominously, inflationary pressures began to re-emerge. Had the dragon of rising prices not been slain after all? Interest rates had to be hiked up again and Lawson became convinced that the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary System was a viable option and hoped to lock sterling into it. The Prime Minister was not so sure and opted for a ‘when the time is right’ approach to Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) membership. The problem was that Lawson did not regard this as a euphemism for never joining.

In the pages of The Times, Lawson found a critic in the monetarism economist Tim Congdon. Congdon argued that, far from having failed, targeting M3 ‘was the key to the government’s principal achievement, the reduction in inflation to under five per cent’. Since abandoning this, ‘Britain has had the strongest surge in private sector credit in its history and the annual rate of money supply growth has increased from about twelve per cent to over twenty per cent’. This was reminiscent of the 25 per cent supply growth rate of the Heath – Barber boom. Britain was returning to a stop – go cycle. Boom, Congdon claimed, would be followed by bust.[38]

Mortgage payments dominated the explosion in personal credit. Second mortgages were becoming common and unsecured lending was on the rise. Home ownership leapt from 57 to 68 per cent during the 1980s. Council-house building programmes were run down (a description that also fitted the estates that remained while local government fought vainly for funds). The ‘right to buy’ had proved one of the Thatcher Government’s most popular policies with the working class, allowing 1.75 million council tenants to buy their homes between 1980 and 1997. For the first time manual, semi-skilled and clerical workers found themselves able to own their own homes, a prospect unthinkable to previous generations. Renting accommodation, which had been the norm for most working-class households, started to be seen as a mark of failure and many of the council estates that remained deteriorated into ‘sink’ estates of deprivation and hopelessness. While the majority made the most of their new-found opportunities to prosper through property, the social division evident for those left behind frightened and depressed the critics of Thatcher’s ‘Home Owning Democracy’.

Part of the problem was that, while the Government took action to dismantle local authorities’ grip on housing provision, it was slower to encourage a rejuvenation of the private rental market. Private rent controls had existed since the latter stages of the First World War and were not relaxed until the end of the 1980s. The American libertarian Janet Daley, who began writing for The Times in 1988, maintained that it was ‘curious that a party devoted to the free market should commit itself so heavily to a system that rewards investment in property (which stultifies the economy), as opposed to investment in industry (which helps it grow)’. The Tories’ Mortgage Income Tax Relief had discouraged mobility, she argued, by tying down home owners while Labour’s security of tenure for tenants had wrecked the private rental market. The result was a workforce immobilized by the restriction of mortgage or council house.[39]

For most Times readers though, the priority was either to get onto the property ladder or stay on top of it. Households’ paper value soared. Some looked at the soaring prices and surmised that the boom was unsustainable. But the steeply rising gradient only encouraged those determined to invest yet more heavily before the price went up again. It was a busy few years for The Times’s property correspondent, Christopher Warman, who held the post between 1983 and 1991. Warman had joined the paper in 1965 and, having been ‘glassed’ during the 1986 printers strike, was revered among fellow journalists as the Holy Martyr of Wapping. Yet, while he busied himself with separating genuine property opportunities from the stately piles of estate agents’ propaganda that awaited him each morning, the paper, inconceivably, failed to add any extra chairs to the property desk. In doing so, it allowed itself to play third violin behind the FT and the Telegraph’s property pages. Like travel journalism, the property section was an obvious target for advertising, and this was an avenue the commercial arm of the paper never properly exploited during the 1980s boom. Even the property supplement that began to appear in the Saturday section had a temporary feel about it, being written largely by freelances. Yet, the soaring property prices were central to the Thatcher revolution and its aspirations for a home-owning democracy. While householders believed they held an ever-appreciating asset, their consumer confidence was buffeted. The Times’s core readership in London and the Home Counties was exactly where the property boom was most evident. In particular, City bonuses fuelled the speculation yet it was many months after ‘Black Wednesday’ before talk of a collapse became widespread. In the meantime, Warman was left alone to report on the seemingly ever-expanding opportunities.

Credit cards were also fuelling consumer aspirations. In 1980, banks were lending £934 million of a £2093 million turnover on credit card accounts. By the end of the decade, the figures were £6600 million and £20b million. When the Thatcher Government had come to power in 1979, three million Briton’s (7 per cent of the population) owned shares. A decade later the figure stood at nine million (25 per cent). Many had bought into the privatized utilities like British Telecom and British Gas and, while most pocketed a quick profit, by the end of the decade BT was still 20 per cent-owned by private investors. More importantly, it was offering a far better service to its customers. The Times met the growing market for personal financial advice more successfully than it did the property boom and on Saturdays a family money section was edited by Jon Ashworth.

Critics viewed the economic and social changes of the 1980s as a mirage built on nothing more substantial than rising house prices and deepening personal debt. Yet these were consequences not causes. The increasing share in employment and wealth of the professions and the service sector at the expense of manual labour was profoundly changing the country. Assessed by the job of the household’s head, a third of Britain was middle class in 1980. By 1989 that figure had passed 40 per cent.

In his Budget of March 1988, Lawson cut the standard rate of income tax to 25 per cent. It had not been this low since before the Second World War and was now almost 30 per cent lower than it had been when Mrs Thatcher first took office. Amid squeals from the Opposition benches that it was socially divisive to cut it, the upper rate of income tax was reduced from 60 per cent to 40 per cent. The Prime Minister was convinced this was a moral as well as an economic policy. In May 1988 she outraged her opponents by addressing the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland with a ‘Sermon on the Mound’ that pointed out that no one would have remembered the Good Samaritan if he had only had good intentions. It was because he had money that he could help.

On the desks of the City’s counting houses, The Times had ceded supremacy in business and financial coverage to the Financial Times in the 1960s. However, the economic boom of the mid-1980s provided it with an opportunity to regain ground. Wilson had long wanted to produce a two-section paper that would be split between a first section of news and comment and a second section of business and sport. Expanding the latter two almost necessitated creating two sections of equal length. The move to Wapping and its less restrictive practices offered the chance to realize his aim. He flew to Hollywood to show Murdoch the proposed redesign. Murdoch approved the decision and the extra expense it involved. Here, it seems, was a mechanism in which the paper could expand its coverage on all fronts. But when the two-section paper was launched the reaction was extraordinarily negative. ‘I got more letters than I had ever had before,’ recalled Wilson. ‘I was very worried.’ Flying over to New York, he went to explain to Murdoch that he believed the two-section paper was the right idea but the reader response had been almost universally terrible. Murdoch told him to do whatever he felt right in his bones, promising to back him in that decision. Over the course of the next decade and the various perceptions of three different editors, The Times demonstrated remarkable inconsistency in making its mind up whether to arrive daily on the newsstands as a single fat paper or a couple of slim ones and, if the latter, which bits should go in which section. None of the presentational forms ever quite seemed entirely satisfactory.

For Wilson, it certainly appeared to be the right moment to be expanding the business pages. At their head was the debonair figure of Kenneth Fleet who had joined the paper in 1983. He was a well-rounded man, born in 1929 and educated at grammar school and the LSE, who was as impressive at the crease as on the ballroom floor and was particularly interested in the theatre (he was director of the Young Vic from 1976 to 1983 and chairman of the Chichester Festival Theatre from 1985 to 1993). He had pioneered a style of financial journalism that was accessible to the ordinary reader at the Daily Telegraph before going on to succeed Nigel Lawson as the City editor of its Sunday sibling. However, he was the sort of editor who reserved his thoughts for his column rather than provide managerial leadership for his department. This was unfortunate since the time for strategic thinking on how to regain the paper’s business profile had clearly arrived. During the mid-eighties, the City was engulfed by takeover mania. The biggest attempt came in December 1985 with Hanson Trust’s £1.9 billion bid for Imperial Group (which eventually succeeded). ‘Big Bang’ took place on 27 October 1986. Within a decade, ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ would be no more. American and German banks became predominant while one by one the old family names succumbed. The City of London began to bear comparison to the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis tournament – Britain provided the desirable venue in which foreigners came to compete and win the trophies. It was nonetheless a process that helped ensure London’s eminence as a world financial sector. To chronicle this, The Times had the largest team of financial journalists outside the FT but ever since the decapitation of The Times business news in 1982 it was an accomplished fiddle player straining to gain recognition besides the virtuoso first violinist of the ‘pink ’un’. Nothing The Times produced could, for example, equal the FT’s impressive forty-eight-page ‘Big Bang’ survey of what it rightly called ‘The City Revolution’. This was despite the fact that Wilson wanted his paper to get in on the act and to prioritize financial over industrial coverage. ‘Charlie was a typical bull market investor,’ reflected Graham Searjeant, a financial editor who had seen it all before.[40]

In the autumn of 1987, Britain was hit by two global forces. On Thursday 15 October, great storms were unleashed upon an unsuspecting southern England. With equal surprise, on the following Monday the stock market experienced the greatest crash of the twentieth century.

After the event, the signs were of course clearer to read than beforehand. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Index had reached a peak of 2772.42 in August after which it had been sliding. When the New York markets opened on 19 October, the index nose-dived 508.32 points to 1738.41. This represented a decline of 22.6 per cent that compared unfavourably with the 1929 crash of 13.2 per cent. By chance, Christopher Warman had flown out by Concorde to New York to meet the property developer Paul Reichmann on the day of the collapse. Reichmann was financing the Canary Wharf development in London’s Docklands and wanted to show Warman what he had achieved in the Battery Park financial district of New York. The view The Times property correspondent was given of the Merrill Lynch trading floor that morning did not give him great confidence in Reichmann’s financial future.[41] As it did with everyone else, the collapse caught Kenneth Fleet off guard. He was at a dinner at the Savoy as news of events on Wall Street came through. With his usual composure, he telephoned through his copy from the dinner before returning to Wapping, still in his dinner jacket, to finesse his response for the late editions. When the City awoke to do business, it followed in Wall Street’s wake, dropping 10.6 per cent and wiping £50 billion off share prices on what became known as ‘Black Monday’.

The losses were staggering and even those who could not yet calculate the full economic implications could grasp that a cultural phenomenon, the yuppie, was in the process of being killed off. Charles Bremner filed from New York, where brokers in their familiar red braces and horn-rimmed spectacles stood around in the evening ‘trying to come to terms with the unthinkable – the roaring Eighties, the years of easy prosperity, could be over’. A mixture of bewilderment, gallows humour and defiance appeared to be carrying them through towards the uncertainties of the following day’s trading.[42] Some estimates put a figure on the paper loss of the stock market crash at a trillion pounds (£1,000,000,000,000). Only Tokyo escaped the share collapse unharmed. At Wapping, Kenneth Fleet soon became one of the casualties. Wilson felt the business editor had lost his former sharpness, although he stayed on to help in the area where he had come best to perform, as a columnist on the City pages, until 1990. In place of Fleet as business editor, David Brewerton was brought in from the Independent. Progress was made with support from John Bell, who provided extensive City news coverage. For some, however, these improvements were not without cost and the atmosphere on the business desk became less agreeable. Seriousness was confused with joylessness. In this respect, the City orientated focus continued to be at the expense of a more rounded survey of a business community that, after a brief renaissance, was about to batten down the hatches for another recession.

V

In editing newspapers, Charles Wilson was a firm believer in the former England manager Alf Ramsay’s doctrine that winning teams were those that got it right at the back. In The Times’s case, this meant improving the sports pages. Wilson looked to the Daily Mail for expertise and found it in that paper’s much admired sports editor, Tom Clarke. Hiring Clarke proved one of Wilson’s shrewder appointments. Despite the quality of its writers, the paper’s sports desk had long been constrained by decades of under-investment. Norman Fox had run a tight ship and necessarily so. When in 1985 his deputy, Richard Williams, was seconded to help set up the move to Wapping, Fox had spent the last months before his retirement with a new deputy, John Goodbody. It was symptomatic of the paper’s attitude that Goodbody initially held a position of such responsibility while on a freelance contract and was still filing copy on football and athletics for the Guardian. Wilson recognized the need for The Times to invest more full-heartedly in Goodbody’s talents and, in recognizing his versatility, encouraged him to find sports stories that had the characteristics necessary for front-page treatment. Among other changes made, Richard Evans switched from the parliamentary lobby to the other inside track of the Turf. Evans, indeed, ran a syndicate of Times journalists – that included Wilson and Clarke – behind a racehorse named (appropriately for sporting hacks) Sunday for Monday. Sadly, it did not prove to have much by way of winning form, a fact that at least ensured there was no ethical dilemma over tipping it on the racing pages. With Wilson’s support, Clarke was able to innovate. Leading figures from the sporting world were commissioned as pundits and commentators with an ‘End Column’ provided as their forum. Previously, the paper had not taken seriously the idea that players might become columnists. Among those called upon to provide expert analysis was the Aston Villa (and soon to be England) manager, Graham Taylor, for the 1990 World Cup. Only in one area did Wilson want to see less coverage. Those who thought the editor was one of nature’s born pugilists were taken aback when he went so far as to suggest The Times should cease reporting on boxing, a sport for which he had distaste. After a discussion, Wilson gave way. It would, for instance, have been difficult for the paper to pretend an Olympic sport was not taking place, particularly if one of its famous – or British – exponents was in the ring. An editorial decision of this kind had last been taken in 1982 when Harry Evans had, after a similar period of consultation, decided The Times should provide match reports of Graham Gooch’s rebel cricket tour of South Africa despite the fact it breached the sporting boycott of the country.

Despite the improvements made by Clarke, two of The Times’s own sports writers who made the deepest impression during these years had been recognized and appointed by Fox back in 1983. One was Simon Barnes who conveyed the unshaven and rather casual demeanour of the Barbour jacket-clad countryman but was a consummate professional and able – to any sports editor’s joy – not only to fill large spaces with well-honed prose at short notice but to file before deadline. Within a short period, Barnes had moved from covering the dog races and pigeon fancying to expatiating knowledgeably on almost every aspect of modern sport (except boxing – where he shared Wilson’s opinion). He also had the greatly prized ability to write about sport in terms that made it of interest to those who avoided recreational activity if they could possibly help it. The other all-purpose sports writer of the period was David Miller. Miller was a prolific journalist, majoring in football, but with a speciality as one who appeared actually to understand the intricacies of Olympics politics. This manifested itself in 1992 with an admiring (and consequently controversial) biography of Juan Antonio Samaranch, the IOC president he esteemed as the Olympic movement’s saviour. Like Samaranch, Miller led a peripatetic lifestyle and thought nothing of hurtling around the British Isles and Western Europe at the wheel of a Mercedes in a manner that suggested no sporting fixture could legitimately begin before he had taken his seat in the grandstand.

The end of amateurism in sport’s higher reaches meant that winning really did become everything – the players’ wages depended upon it. In his first article for The Times, Miller examined the consequences of the growth of professionalism. Twenty years previously, he wrote, amateurism had demonstrated not only its inadequacies but also its inequalities: the ‘shamateur’ status preferred by the All England Club and the ‘odious separate door for Players at Lord’s’. Even when money was involved in the game, players usually saw little of it. Until 1960, footballers had been subjected to a maximum wage that ‘humbled the genius of a Matthews or Mannion with a clerk’s wages’. Amateurism’s death had put an end to these wrongs, but professionalism had caused a wholesale corruption of sporting values. It had created ‘the percentage player and the professional foul’, on-court obscenities at Wimbledon, drugs and consumer placement in athletics, match-fixing allegations in Test cricket and ‘the most morally corrupt World Cup yet’. To Miller, professional sportsmen had lost sight of ethics that made their endeavour noble: ‘Sport at its pinnacle is foremost about glory, and nowhere does the dictionary definition of that word mention winning, only honourable fame. More often than not it is the quality of the loser which determines the fame of the winner’.[43]

By the mid-1980s, professionalism had come to dominate sport. Athletics held out as a pastime for amateurs until 1981 and rugby union until 1995, when the pressures created by the sums to be earned elsewhere – including in rugby league – and the momentum set in train by the belated inauguration of the World Cup in 1987 finally proved too great to resist. The final shoves were given by Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch. Packer, who had transformed cricket in the 1970s, was aiming to establish a rival professional World Rugby championship that would lure players away from the amateur game with the prospect of large payments. News Corp.’s £370 million agreement with the Australian, New Zealand and South African authorities for a ten-year television rights’ deal meant that the money existed to pay the southern hemisphere’s players a competitive salary. ‘Yesterday in Paris the nettle was grasped by the International Rugby Football Board,’ wrote David Hands, The Times’s seasoned rugby correspondent on the decision to endorse professionalism, adding, ‘now we await the rash.’[44] Hands foresaw that at the highest levels the sport would change ‘from being a player’s game’ into ‘part of the entertainment industry, to be bought and sold by those who dabble in the sporting marketplace’. By becoming ‘a weapon in the television ratings war’ it would also depend upon ‘the cash that only television can inject’.[45] So ended the Five Nations as the British Isles’ most important amateur championship.

Yet, long before rugby union went professional, many of its leading players had discovered the opportunities to make money, even legitimately, from the sport without formally drawing an income. The Corinthian spirit in its truest form – where there was neither money nor even much personal fame to be won – was confined to popular fixtures of minority sports like the Boat Race. Between the wars, it was a measure of The Times’s perception of its core market that it gave about as much coverage to the annual tussle between the Oxford and Cambridge University crews as it did to any sporting occasion anywhere in the world. Although the paper’s priorities had broadened by the last twenty years of the century, the Boat Race’s very unusualness as a tough but amateur contest nonetheless continued to keep successive rowing correspondents, Jim Railton and Mike Rosewell, close to the tideway during February and March.

In 1987, the Boat Race became front-page news. Some doubted that even it could retain gentlemanly values when, in the run up to the 133rd race, the Oxford boat was rocked by a mutiny. Five world-class American rowers, mainly imported to the university on short postgraduate courses, rebelled against Oxford’s fabled coach, Dan Topolski, and the boat club president, Donald Macdonald. The annual battle of the blues had long had an international flavour among its student oarsmen but some felt that the large number of high-quality foreign imports in recent years had undermined the essentially home-grown and undergraduate nature that gave the contest its charm.

What was at stake was, in the words of The Times’s headline, ‘The great American disaster and the Great British institution’.[46] Against this, there were countervailing considerations. If the race did not encourage rowers of the highest quality, it could be derided as an anachronism that was amateur in the pejorative sense of the word. One of the mutineers, the cox Jonathan Fish, wrote a column for The Times entitled ‘Ideas of the Boat Race just a myth’ that attempted to set out the Americans’ position: ‘The mystique of the Boat Race throughout the world is that it represents honesty, fairness and sportsmanship. However, our experiences with the present Oxford University Boat Club hierarchy have shown this not to be true.’ Topolski and Macdonald, Fisk suggested, were more interested in defending their own regime and traditions than selecting the fastest possible crew – the technically superior Americans. The build-up to the race, with claim and counter-claim, was exactly suited to The Times’s increasing interest in previewing contests. John Goodbody, a Cambridge man, found himself lurking around Oxford boathouses on the trail of Topolski, his former classmate at Westminster School. As it happened, the OUBC coach was not backward in coming forward and used The Times’s letters page to state his case and denounce the Boat Race’s critics.[47] For everyone – except for the Americans and Cambridge – there was a fairy-tale ending to the saga. Come the great day, the Oxford boat, hastily cobbled together with volunteers from the Isis reserve, rowed to an improbable four-length victory. The events later inspired a film, True Blue. Quoting the vindicated Oxford president, David Miller wrote, ‘“The race is about big hearts, not big reputations.” That is the concept which the American experts seemingly could not, and can not, comprehend.’[48]

At the Winter Olympics in Calgary the following February, Britons again demonstrated their preference for the amateur spirit when they applauded the ski jumping effort of Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards who came a convincing last. In such sports where the British had long given up serious hopes of beating the rest of the world, it was easy to understand why a mere enthusiast like Edwards could be taken to the public’s hearts. The national virility test of the Summer Olympics in September 1988 was a different matter entirely.

After the Palestinian terrorism at Munich in 1972, the crippling cost of hosting the Games in Montreal in 1976 and the political boycotts that marred the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and Los Angeles four years later, it was not surprising that the choice of South Korea, struggling to emerge from repressive government and in a state of continual cold war with North Korea, had been controversial. Miller, however, was enthusiastic from the start, writing ‘The Koreans have the organization of the Germans, the courtesy and culture of the Orient and the sense of money of the Americans. They can hardly fail.’[49] He was right. It proved to be the first Olympiad in twenty-four years to pass without violence or a major boycott. In this sense the Games were returning to de Coubertin’s idealistic notions of international comity. Yet, in another respect, it emphasized the extent to which fair play had given way to winning at all costs. Seoul proved to be the drugs Olympics. There was clearly something peculiar about the final tally in which East Germany won more gold medals than the United States. This proved to have less to do with State investment and the triumph of socialist man than – as was revealed following German reunification – the extent of the GDR’s State-sponsored drug programme. During the Olympics, though, it was the ‘greatest race of all time’, dominated by Canada’s Ben Johnson, that attracted the headlines.

Crossing the line in 9.79 seconds, Johnson broke the 100 metres world record in imperious style. He was the fastest man in the world. It was suggested that he had set a record that might not be broken in fifty or a hundred years. While the stadium erupted in joy and salutation, John Goodbody made his way over to Simon Barnes and stated incredulously, ‘I don’t know about anabolic steroids but that guy is on rocket fuel.’ Waiting for Johnson to face the press, Goodbody was seen mimicking to Barnes the action of a man injecting himself.[50] Although such suspicions were commonly expressed within journalistic circles they could not, of course, be printed in the newspaper and Johnson’s amazing feat won ovations across the world. Two days later the results of his failed drugs test were revealed. The story broke with impeccably difficult timing. It was almost 7 p.m. in Wapping and Tom Clarke had less than half an hour left before his section deadline. He telephoned Goodbody who was fast asleep in the Seoul Olympic media village (it was four in the morning there), rallying him with the cry ‘this is mustard!’. Goodbody immediately swung into action, got confirmation that the wire report on Johnson was true and, within an hour, had filed a report down the telephone that was plastered across the front page. The only interruption to Goodbody’s attempt to file had come from Wilson, who, hovering like an excited schoolboy at the copy taker’s shoulder, grabbed the receiver and bellowed down the line in broad Glaswegian, ‘It’s all yer fault, Goodbody, you invented anabolic steroids!’

Goodbody had been at the journalistic forefront of exposing the extent to which there was a lucrative trade in performance-enhancing drugs. His articles were part of a campaign to force legislation making illegal possession of non-prescription steroids, a contribution that was recognized by the British Sports Journalism awards. There had been a long history of horse-doping scandals, steroids in weightlifting and stimulants in cycling, but sports’ authorities had been slow to wake up to what was going on in other disciplines, especially athletics. In May 1987, David Jenkins, the 1972 Olympic silver medallist, had gone on trial for running a lucrative anabolic steroid-smuggling operation and at the world athletics championships, the American sprinter Carl Lewis had made allegations against unspecified opponents. Goodbody’s articles followed. That the debate was still in its infancy was clear when the paper also published an article by Dr Richard Nicholson that recited evidence that the steroids’ medical side effects had been overemphasized – a position that in turn drew a furious rebuke from Ron Pickering in the sport section’s ‘End Column’.[51] Despite the warnings of Goodbody, Pickering and others, it was Ben Johnson’s seventy-two-hour metamorphosis from international hero to global villain that made drugs the central issue in athletics. With Johnson’s disqualification, Carl Lewis was moved up into gold position and Britain’s Linford Christie into silver. Subsequent drug test revelations would eventually create suspicion about even their achievements. The day after Johnson’s race, Florence Griffith-Joyner, the American sprinter celebrated around the world as ‘Flo-Jo’, won the women’s 100 metres and on 28 September, while the shock waves of Johnson’s shame were still reverberating, she set a world record in the 200 metres that also looked impregnable to future generations. The Times did not feel at liberty to circulate the rumours that these triumphs were also drugs-assisted. The paper was not so reticent when she died from a heart attack in 1998 aged thirty-eight, the obituary quoting an opinion that the glamorous runner was ‘a drug addled hermaphrodite’.[52] She had retired, hurriedly, from athletics the year after her 1988 triumphs, aged twenty-nine, on the eve of mandatory random drugs testing – one of the Seoul’s major legacies.

The increasingly professional attitude adopted by athletes put winning above other considerations. The drug-fuelled means by which a few of them pursued this goal had the tarnishing effect of putting winners under a cloud of suspicion. It was an extraordinary turnaround. Generations of schoolmasters had upheld the cause of sport because they believed it built character. As Simon Barnes articulated only too clearly, it was also a means of revealing character. Nothing, though, could alter the fundamental human drama of competition. ‘The Olympic Games, like all sporting events, are about disappointment,’ Barnes wrote when it was time to pack up and leave the Olympic village. ‘Every race has more losers than winners, but for winners, there is the strange, unearthly disappointment of victory. To have your dream come true must be the most frightening and disillusioning experience of them all.’[53]

CHAPTER EIGHT

STURM UND DRANG

Poor Morale; Robert Fisk Departs; New Faces;

Thatcher on the Ropes; the Collapse of Communism;

Something for the weekend; Sent to Siberia

I

There was something distinctly odd about the old rum warehouse in which The Times’s journalists daily got down to work. Producing a journal that purported to illuminate the ways of the world from a building that had almost no windows was a metaphor worthy of Kafka. After January 1987, the baying hordes outside, shouting abuse and hurling iron railings, had packed off and gone. But the sense of being under siege was not lifted with their departure.

Wapping was home to at least three editors whose reputations for brilliance and brusqueness extended far beyond their offices. In the floors above the giant printing hall, Kelvin MacKenzie appeared to be a law unto himself at the Sun, the most iconic, trailblazing and incorrigible of any British newspaper in the 1980s. Strong-willed and abrasive Scotsmen ruled the roost at either end of the long rum warehouse. At its west end was the office of the Sunday Times’s editor, Andrew Neil. A cordon sanitaire of boilers, pipes and humming power generators separated his domain from that of his compatriot, Charles Wilson, at the east end where The Times was based. Life in these quarters was difficult. Times journalists felt as if they were toiling on board an unusually elongated hunter-killer submarine patrolled by a gifted but periodically tyrannical captain. At the far end – where the design team, features, sport and business writers were located – there was at least some legroom. However, the closer operations got to Wilson’s command post, the more claustrophobic it became. Journalists sat alongside the foreign desk monitoring incoming wire reports and information traffic. A galley of subs separated them from the keyboard-pounding reporters on the home news desk. The advantage of this cheek-by-jowl existence was that there was nowhere to hide – the crew members were always visible and usually within hollering or shoulder-tapping distance. This benefited subs wanting to check changes to stories with their authors. For a hands-on commander like Wilson, it was particularly useful. A mezzanine level had been slotted within the rafters. This doubled as the captain’s bridge. From it, Wilson could stand and harangue the ratings stretched out below as far as the eye could see. Those who clambered up to his berth soon discovered that he too was a stranger to comfort. Such was the makeshift nature that the staff lavatories had been erected adjacent to Wilson’s wardroom. Potential eavesdroppers were deterred by his periodic habit of giving an almighty kick to the Gents’ door as he passed. Those who did squeeze into his personal cabin discovered just how cramped were the conditions from which he charted the paper’s course. Its low ceiling was liable to spring a leak whenever there was a heavy downpour. Those most committed to the submarine analogy found this particularly unsettling.

It was not an environment conducive to high morale. Wilson was under tremendous pressure and was well aware that his most able staff members were subject to relentless targeting by the Independent to jump ship. Some of the most prized names succumbed. Never had the competition been so intense. What especially alarmed Wilson was when a journalist who was no stranger to hardship and did not even have to work from Wapping decided that he too had had enough. Robert Fisk was The Times’s most famous serving reporter. The editor treated his decision to quit as a shattering blow.

Wilson liked Fisk because he admired his courage and professionalism. Politically, the two men had little in common. Fisk had made his reputation at The Times during the 1970s when he had been a thorn in the side of the British Army in Ulster. When he shifted his reporting to the Middle East in 1976, the Israeli forces and government came to loathe him no less. To many of Israel’s sympathizers in Britain he was a hated figure and accusations of anti-Semitism (which he furiously rejected) were frequently levelled at him and The Times for indulging his passions. Yet, he had not regarded Murdoch’s purchase of the paper with quite the same foreboding as had some left-leaning journalists. Frequently, he had risked his life to bring out stories from the world’s most dangerous region only to discover that the unions had called a strike and the paper had not come out. Four years into News International’s ownership, Fisk was still happy to state that Murdoch could have cloven hoofs for all he cared – at least he brought out the newspaper.[1] It was easy to understand why he was sanguine. With Douglas-Home in the editor’s chair, he knew he had a protector who would defend his right to report events in the Middle East as he saw them. ‘While Douglas-Home was there, there was no problem, you could write what you liked about the Israelis,’ Fisk recalled.[2] He began, however, to sense that Douglas-Home’s successor was uneasy about some of the stories he wished to pursue. Wilson looked to balance Fisk’s dispatches with columnists who were sympathetic to Israel’s case. This should not have been a problem. Fisk, however, took particular exception to what he saw as a personal slur when a columnist was allowed to state that journalists working from West Beirut could not report fairly because they were too scared or embedded with the Muslim militias. A collision course had been set.

The divergence between what The Times was saying on its leader page and what its Middle East correspondent was reporting on its front page became increasingly apparent. In April 1986, US warplanes flying from British bases attempted to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in Tripoli. Instead, they killed around a hundred others including the Libyan leader’s adopted daughter. Fisk was there to record the scene of devastation. The leading article, however, defended the raid. Such was the extent of complaints from readers at this line of argument that the paper was forced to write another leader that conceded ‘a newspaper which finds itself in marked disagreement with the opinions of its readers must seriously address their concerns if it is to have any hope of influencing them’.[3] Having originally believed that the paper’s editorial line was no business of his so long as he was left to report events as he saw fit, Fisk increasingly felt annoyed and perhaps even snubbed by the tone taken on surrounding pages.[4]

Like Douglas-Home before him, Wilson recognized Fisk as a courageous man, prepared to risk his life daily for his profession. Wilson admired toughness. In 1984 he had even gone out to visit him in Beirut. There, he was introduced to Fisk’s close friend Terry Anderson, the bureau chief of the Associated Press news agency. Keen to talk to Israeli troops in order to get their point of view, Wilson travelled with Fisk to southern Lebanon. It proved a mistake. One Israeli lieutenant left Wilson in no doubt about his views when he promptly had him arrested. Giving the command ‘get these bastards out of here’, the officer had the two distinguished Times journalists put under armed guard and sent back to Beirut. When they reached the capital it was to discover there had been another suicide bomb attack on the (new) American Embassy.

Filing copy from the Lebanon to London was a particularly frustrating part of Fisk’s job. The era of the mobile phone had not arrived and getting through on a landline was a process that could take many hours if achieved at all. Instead, late afternoons and early evenings were spent up in the AP bureau, huddled over a stuttering telex machine whose staccato click-click-clicking replicated the outbursts of rapid machine-gun fire in the streets outside. The AP wire was an old machine using Second World War technology that worked with codes punched out on tape. Whenever the electricity cut out before the complete coding had gone through to London, the whole process would have to be repeated, the tape stuck back together and pushed through the machine with a new code added while Fisk prayed for the requisite twenty minutes of uninterrupted electricity supply. Such orisons were frequently offered up in vain and filing reports that ran to several pages could take hours. There would then be the anxious wait before a telex would come back stating all the pages had been received and understood.

Yet, getting through to London was far from the greatest of Fisk’s problems. Various militant factions, most notably the pro-Iranian Islamic Jihad, began kidnapping Westerners. In March 1984, Jeremy Levin, bureau chief of CNN, was kidnapped. Five months later Jonathan Wright, a Reuters correspondent, also fell victim. Both men eventually managed to escape but the seizures continued. In March 1985, Islamic Jihad took Terry Anderson hostage. Others followed, including Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s representative, who had tried to negotiate their release. By the spring of the following year, forty-seven foreigners had been abducted over the previous twenty-seven months. Of this number, twenty-six had been subsequently released and five were definitely dead. The fate of the others was in doubt. Faced with this level of danger, all but the most hard-boiled reporters packed up and left. The number of Western journalists based in Beirut fell from more than seventy in 1984 to seventeen in 1986. By then, there was not a single American reporter still around. ‘Lebanese and Palestinian gunmen have now almost achieved what the Israelis could never have hoped for,’ reported Fisk; ‘much of the war in southern Lebanon is now reported only from Jerusalem, where correspondents are in no danger of being kidnapped.’[5] Fisk had no intention of relying on the Israeli government for his information. He saw it as his calling to be a witness on the front line.

Fisk’s obstinacy (some mistook it for a death wish) riled those for whom he was also a liability. The Times came under pressure from the Foreign Office to have him withdrawn from Beirut and relocated to a place of greater safety. Wilson, however, had a right winger’s natural disdain for the Foreign Office. He demurred and made it clear to Fisk that he trusted his judgment and would stand by whatever he decided to do. From a personal perspective, this was a courageous position to adopt since the editor was likely to face far less criticism for forcing his correspondent to leave than if he allowed him to be captured and killed. When Fisk replied that he was willing to go back and continue reporting, Wilson’s reply was characteristic, ‘Ok matey. Good luck.’[6]

Back in Beirut, Fisk’s life was a misery. Shells continued to rain down on the city, frequently exploding close to him. Long hours were spent in the comfortless refuge of a windowless corridor. The prospect of being kidnapped was as much a probability as a possibility. If the Archbishop of Canterbury’s envoy was not sacred, it could be presumed that the life of a Times journalist was cheap. To avoid capture, he had to constantly alter his movements, give false names and even make false arrangements. He avoided meeting Western diplomats since this opened him up to allegations of being in cahoots with Western spies. A car circling his building was an extremely worrying occurrence. The prospect of betrayal appeared at every corner. One Lebanese employee at a press bureau asked casually which flight he was catching. Fisk told him. The man disappeared into what had been Terry Anderson’s office. Fisk loitered long enough to overhear him whispering down a telephone in Arabic. He was passing on the flight times and movements. Fisk opted not to go to the airport. What was particularly distressing was that his betrayer was the same employee who in 1978 had saved his life.[7]

This was not the environment in which a roaming reporter could operate effectively. Nor was it conducive to embarking upon a relationship either, despite Fisk’s hopes of settling down to married life with the Financial Times journalist Lara Marlowe. Eventually, Wilson arranged for him to take up a new role as a Paris based features writer for The Times. Fisk accepted and enjoyed his new post, but privately he was in a quandary over whether to stay with the paper. He now considered its editorial stance so irksome that he found himself hesitant to mention who his employer was when the subject came up in conversation. The Times, he felt, had changed a lot from the liberal-minded journal he had joined in 1971. He disliked its coverage of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, being particularly upset that it had not probed more deeply into security service operations there as he had once done. He was horrified that the paper had urged the BBC and ITV to supply the RUC with film of the brutal murder of two British soldiers in Belfast. This Fisk regarded as a betrayal of journalistic integrity. He was equally opposed to its increasingly hard-line attitude towards the Middle East. He had been appalled by a leading article, ‘Death of a Terrorist’, that all but supported the Israeli assassination of Abu Jihad. Fisk had long questioned The Times’s promiscuous use of the word ‘terrorist’ when referring to Arab groups but not to Israeli or Lebanese Christian troops in the area.

There was also the question of the proprietor, whose toughness Fisk had previously applauded. ‘I do not for a moment think that Mr Murdoch dictates our leaders or our op-ed pages,’ he assured Wilson, ‘but the organization is so powerful – and has shown itself so ruthless – that many on our editorial staff simply have no inclination to challenge what they think is the received opinion.’ The deciding moment came when the USS Vincennes, an American warship in the Gulf which mistakenly thought it was under attack, shot down an Iranian passenger jet, killing 290 civilians. The Times quickly postulated on why the Iranian airbus was so far off course and even pondered whether a suicide pilot was flying it. Fisk filed a report making use of air-traffic recordings he had heard. This did not tie in with the line the leading article had peddled and Fisk’s copy was edited accordingly. Four months later, Fisk resigned. ‘It is impossible for a reporter to risk his life under fire for a newspaper in which he no longer believes,’ he later explained. The Independent, he had came to the conclusion, was more like The Times he had happily joined in 1971. It was to the Independent he would now go.[8]

Wilson was both horrified and hurt at the prospect of his most famous reporter’s departure. At a personal level they had always had mutual regard and – with the exception of the Vincennes incident – Fisk could certainly not claim that the paper had treated him, or his copy, without due respect. Wilson, however, was not prepared to let him leave without first putting up the sort of fight that between less strong-minded individuals would have been grounds for a terminated friendship. When a personal appeal failed, he threatened Fisk with breach of contract, claiming he would refuse to release him to the Independent. In fact, thanks to the Lebanese postal service which had become as dislocated as everything else in that country, the contract had never been received or signed but the editor was not prepared to let this detail stand in the way. Clearly the matter had to be settled and on 18 November 1988 Fisk came to see Wilson at his office. The meeting began in sorrow and ended in anger. According to Fisk’s account, Wilson pleaded, ‘You have to do your duty to The Times’, to which the reply came, ‘I cannot do duty to a paper which I no longer respect.’ Wilson snapped back, ‘I’m not asking you to respect it, I’m asking you to work for it.’ Fisk refused, saying simply, ‘The Times lacks honour.’ At this, Wilson, agitated and wounded in equal measure, rose to his feet. ‘That is personally insulting,’ he growled. Fisk explained that, as far as he was concerned, ‘some of its leaders are morally bad’. He particularly objected to the excoriating tone of a leading article entitled ‘His Infamous Career’, written to mark the death of Sean MacBride, the international human rights campaigner who had been the IRA’s chief of staff. Whatever the contradictory actions of MacBride’s life and work, there was clearly no prospect of a ceasefire in the editor’s office at Wapping. Finally, after further traded accusations, the meeting broke up. ‘See you soon,’ Wilson said. ‘No,’ replied Fisk, making for the door (which had been locked) and the end of almost eighteen years at the paper. ‘It’s goodbye, Charles, and good luck.’[9]

II

The disapproving chorus from those who believed The Times ‘was no longer the paper it used to be’ (an ad hoc community that appears to have existed since issue two on 2 January 1785) sometimes focused on superficial changes. They grumbled at the increasing size of headlines, the overuse of diagrams and the assumption that popular entertainers are household names even at exclusive addresses. Yet many, especially those who praised the Independent for supposedly turning the clock back, felt that Charles Wilson had detached The Times from the liberal-Tory moorings to which it had been chained during Rees-Mogg’s fourteen years in the chair. For them, Fisk’s departure was evidence that the paper no longer tolerated alternative voices. In fact, Wilson was anxious to please. Indeed, he not only wanted to provide a wider forum for middle-of-the-road opinions but also sought to attract back some of the centre-left voices that had stopped writing for the paper at the time of the Labour Party’s boycott of the Wapping titles. With the lifting of the edict, attempts were made to reestablish links. During 1987 and 1988 Ben Pimlott wrote regularly for the paper while Jack Straw returned to write the fortnightly column from which he had withdrawn in January 1986. Whether employing Robert Kilroy-Silk as a weekly columnist aided or retarded the process of reaching out to those to the left of centre was perhaps more debatable. Militant activists had ousted him from his Liverpool constituency and The Times serialized Hard Labour, the account of his travails. His subsequent career as a daytime television host and increasingly populist maverick of the right clouded the image he had first brought to The Times in 1987 as a promising and charismatic, if somewhat polemical, voice.

Where the claim that the paper had shifted politically to the right did have most substance was in the opinions emanating from the leader conferences (although the editorial line was not markedly more hawkish than in the days when it had been penned by Douglas-Home). John O’Sullivan – who wrote the Conservatives’ 1987 election manifesto – and Frank Johnson – who wrote the 1987 election day leading article commending a Tory vote – were among the leader writers moving the paper to the right at a moment when Max Hastings was attempting to redirect the Daily Telegraph away from this ground. In 1987, The Times gained a refugee from Hastings’s low tolerance for those who preached ‘the doctrines of Victorian Conservatism’.[10] This was T. E. Utley. Universally known except in print as ‘Peter’, Utley had been blind since the age of nine and overcame the inability to read or type to become one of the great comment journalists of the previous twenty years. Dictating trenchantly argued copy to his secretaries, he had advocated Thatcherism back when Margaret Thatcher was a Heath supporter, personally encouraged a younger generation of Tory-minded journalists, and done as much as any man to invigorate the Telegraph’s intellectual traditions. His treatment by that paper’s new guard certainly demonstrated that there was little romance or gratitude to be dispensed or expected in the modern newspaper world. Wilson, however, welcomed him to Wapping and to the paper for which he had first worked at the outset of his career during the Second World War. The Times gained a new advocate for the Ulster Unionist cause on the Op-Ed page to replace Owen Hickey whose leader writing days Wilson had finally drawn to a close. Besides his closely argued essays on the Op-Ed page, Utley also became obituaries editor in succession to John Grigg. Utley appeared set to enjoy a lengthy Indian summer at The Times. Sadly, it was not to be; he died the following year, at the age of sixty-seven.

Wilson’s switch of Grigg from the obits department to become a columnist was one of the signs that he was aware of the need to reclaim prominent liberal voices for the paper. Grigg was exactly the sort of Times man that it was popularly assumed had defected to the Independent. He was sympathetic towards the SDP and was, in several admirable respects, the embodiment of a generation described in his friend Noel Annan’s book, Our Age. His father, Sir Edward Grigg, had been ‘Imperial Editor’ of The Times before the First World War and, after the conflict, had successively advised Lloyd George, become an anti-appeasement Conservative MP and ended up as Lord Altrincham. John Grigg processed through Eton and Oxford (where he won the Gladstone Memorial Prize) and, during the Second World War, the Grenadier Guards. He had unsuccessfully attempted to become a Tory MP in the 1950s and in 1963 renounced the peerage he had inherited from his father in order to pursue his political ambition. It was to remain unfulfilled – possibly because constituency associations were unhappy with an infamous article he had written in 1957 criticizing the Court’s stultifying atmosphere. He had dared to describe the Queen’s public appearances as those of a ‘priggish schoolgirl’. At the time a passer-by in the street punched him in the face. Rudeness, though, was very far from being his stock in trade. A cultivated and engaging man, Grigg brought to The Times the historian’s erudition to the analysis of political events, focusing particularly on lessons from the period of Lloyd George and the Liberal collapse (perhaps Grigg’s greatest achievement was his multi-volume biography of the Liberal war leader who knew his father). The fortunes of the House of Windsor also provided plenty of scope for his historical insight. His column continued until 1995, after which he specialized in reviewing books for the paper. Sir Edward Pickering commissioned him to write volume six of the official History of The Times covering the years of Rees-Mogg’s editorship, 1966–81, which he completed in 1993. It was widely regarded as the most definitive of the series.

Grigg embodied the understated but authoritative approach of an older generation. Attracting the freshness and vigour of younger voices was no less important. In 1965, the management of all national newspapers had succumbed to an NUJ edict banning the recruitment of any reporter direct from university. Instead, they would first have to work three years on provincial newspapers. This restrictive practice crumbled with the union that had promoted it. Under Peter Stothard’s direction, The Times was the first national newspaper to establish a trainee journalist scheme for graduates. Thus the paper became the first port of call for ambitious aspiring hacks who wanted to skip the supposed grind of the regional press. Traditionalists demurred at the consequences of this form of gentrification, believing that a stint on a local newspaper provided a far broader education in the basic journalistic skills than could be offered by a swift transition from student digs in Clifton or Cowley to a by-line on a national paper. The Times’s scheme however – which included a short spell with a provincial placement – proved a great success in luring intelligent and articulate graduates into journalism who, faced with the alternative of reporting on leaks from the parish pump, might have otherwise been tempted away by the increasingly lucrative alternatives of law, accountancy and the City. ‘We were the way in’ as Stothard put it.[11] In consequence, he became the minder to a whole new Fleet Street kindergarten of talent.

One who arrived in the guise of a trainee was Toby Young, a precociously witty, socially outgoing and, to all intents and purposes, untameable youth. Another was his Oxford contemporary Boris Johnson who had been President of the Union and a Classics Scholar at Balliol. Both proceeded to make their mark in the paper and, in doing so, encouraged a mailbag from those who felt misrepresented in the articles they penned. Whatever the doubts about the accuracy of their reporting, Young and Johnson could have gone on to become rich adornments of The Times. Unfortunately, they fell victim to a reluctance to take the risks involved. Young was sacked for writing freelance articles in the Mail on Sunday’s You magazine although not before he had hacked into Wilson’s confidential files on the database by making the inspired guess that the access codeword would be ‘Top Man’. Purporting to be the editor, he proceeded to send vernacularly phrased instructions to various colleagues and departmental heads. Next, he hacked into the database that listed everyone’s salary, which he mass copied to every computer screen in the building. In the circumstances, his dismissal was perhaps understandable. Boris Johnson’s career at The Times was even briefer. He was sacked for making up a quote in an article. He went on to become a star columnist at the Daily Telegraph, editor of the Spectator, enter Parliament and become the closest thing the fourth estate had to a genuine celebrity.

The Times was better able to hold onto another high-profile journalist, Barbara Amiel. She had been a journalistic sensation in Canada where she had edited the Toronto Sun having gone to the country in her adolescence (she had been born in London to a Jewish lawyer and colonel who later committed suicide), fallen out with her family and graduated from Toronto University. By 1980, at the age of thirty-nine, she had already published her autobiography, Confessions. Returning to the land of her birth, by the time she arrived at Wapping in 1986 she was on her third marriage and had switched from Marxism to neoconservatism with all the zeal of the convert. Peregrine Worsthorne had turned her down for a job at the Sunday Telegraph in part because he mistook her fragrant and carefully coiffured appearance for a lack of seriousness. The Times thought otherwise. ‘She looks like Gina Lollobrigida and writes like Bernard Levin – and do get it the right way round,’ said a friend.[12] Times readers of long standing might have thought this was slightly overegging it, at least in regard to the venerable Levin. She certainly had his spark and gifts for invective although could not reasonably be expected (who could?) to match the extraordinary breadth of his cultural range. Others believed her presence tilted the paper’s political scales too far to the right.

Of all the appointments Wilson made, none was more surprising or inspired than when, in the autumn of 1988, he hit upon the idea of employing Matthew Parris in succession to Craig Brown as The Times’s parliamentary sketchwriter. The appointment was a risk. Aged thirty-nine, Parris had spent seven years on the Conservative backbenches before resigning his seat in favour of a television career which soon came to an abrupt halt when LWT axed Weekend World, the Sunday political programme he had presented – it was widely accepted – less adeptly than his predecessor, Brian Walden. Parris’s print journalism was limited to three one-off articles for The Times over the past six years and a few Sunday Times book reviews. There was no doubt that he had the requisite intellect. From a childhood spent partly in Rhodesia, he had gone up to Cambridge, won a fellowship to Yale, been a trainee diplomat at the Foreign Office and worked for Mrs Thatcher at the Conservative Research Department before becoming a Tory MP in 1979 at the age of thirty. After such early precocity, the resignation of his seat and the failure of Weekend World suggested talent unfulfilled. When Wilson telephoned him with the offer of The Times parliamentary sketch, Parris was even in two minds about accepting. ‘I was nearly forty,’ he recalled, ‘and I had never met with conspicuous success in any job I’d done.’ What was more, having been an MP, ‘this trudging back, a mere reporter, into a place I had quit as a Member with head held high to be a television star, was a kind of defeat. How could I return except with my tail between my legs? The job seemed a come-down.’[13]

It was, as he later came to accept, his making. Yet so unsure was he initially that he suggested doing it for only twelve months (it ended up being thirteen years). He also agreed to do a weekly Op-Ed column on Mondays. His sketch writing got off to a shaky start. Dispatched to the Liberal Democrats’ conference in Blackpool, he filed for the first day. It had to compete with the rather more interesting news of Ben Johnson’s drugs shame. The following day Parris did not bother filing at all – unaware that Wapping was expecting daily copy, regardless of whether there was anything worth reporting or not.[14] Within weeks, he had established himself as a crucial feature of the paper. Many of his greatest fans appeared to be his targets for ridicule. Indeed, it was generally his impression that, regardless of their politics, most MPs were so desperate to be noticed and to feel they were important, that they enjoyed a mention in a Parris sketch, almost regardless of how much fun was being had at their expense. In this respect, they were different from peers of the realm. Parris’s occasional sketches from House of Lords’ debates sometimes provoked personal notes from the close friends of peers (never from the peer personally) writing to let him know how much hurt his jests had caused their target. Working peers toiled long and hard for little public acknowledgement and no proper salary. They did not see why their devotion to public service should be a matter for satire.[15] Disliking causing unnecessary offence, it was little wonder that Parris preferred to look down from the gallery upon the self-promoting politicians of the lower chamber. He was the first columnist to have his handiwork reprinted in the New Oxford Book of English Prose.

There were other arrivals. In 1989 a cost-cutting plan that, in everything but the comment section, merged the Daily and Sunday Telegraph into a seven-day paper caused chaos and resentment within the ranks of Conrad Black’s empire. The Times benefited from refugees from this miscalculation that included Martin Ivens and Graham Paterson. Wilson might have been presiding over a newspaper that was losing some of its most famous journalists, but he was also responsible for ensuring that it gained new ones who would add lustre to it in the years ahead.

III

Thatcherism’s domestic agenda was blown off course by three ill winds: the poll tax, the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s faltering grip on the economy and Britain’s relations with Europe. The last two became interconnected. After pushing through the legislation to create a single European market, the Prime Minister became much more uneasy about the European Community. She became personally antagonistic towards Jacques Delors, the French socialist who was the European Commission’s president. Where Thatcher envisaged the single market as an end in itself, Delors saw it as the prerequisite for an extension of Brussels’ competences in other areas, including social legislation. He dared to suggest that, in the future, 80 per cent of legislation would emanate from Brussels. Thatcher had fooled herself into believing the expressions of support for European economic and European monetary union (EMU) that accompanied the Single Act were windy rhetoric. On this she was soon disabused. Europe’s idealists were more practical than she realized. The Delors Report set June 1989 as the date for agreement on commencing the process towards EMU. Forewarned that the Prime Minister was about to make her opposition explicit, The Times ran for cover, its leading article warning her against making a speech that would give the impression to the country’s partners that Britain wanted to be a disruptive player, a notion that would deny ‘Mrs Thatcher an unusual opportunity to take a leading role in Europe as it approaches its single market in 1992’.[16] The Prime Minister, however, was not in the mood for such equivocation. Later that day she addressed the College of Europe in Bruges and delivered a speech that would become one of the most important of her career. In it she reaffirmed her belief in nation states and warned that at a time when central control was being seen to fail in Eastern Europe the future lay not with Delors’s socialist utopia: ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level.’ She wanted the completion of the single market in 1992 to ensure deregulation not centralization and monetary union. These Euro-sceptical shots across the bow were widely resented. Reporting from Bruges, Nicholas Wood quoted a senior European official as calling her remarks ‘outrageous and unrelentingly negative’.[17] The Times was left to sigh ineffectually, ‘she is honest where our partners are idealistic. Their point is that there is a place for ideals.’[18]

The Times was not yet a Euro-sceptic paper although it failed to have the strength of conviction to make clear exactly what sort of a European Community it did envisage. The prospect of creating a single European currency, however, meant that the period for prevarication had passed. The precursor to signing up for the new currency was to stabilize sterling’s exchange rate with those of her partners in the Exchange Rate Mechanism. The Prime Minister’s problems were compounded not only by Cabinet colleagues who favoured joining the ERM because they wanted to sign up to the single currency but by those – including the Chancellor of the Exchequer – who thought the ERM’s anti-inflationary disciplines were the overheating British economy’s only hope of salvation. During May 1989, interest rates were pushed up to 14 per cent. The following month inflation hit 8.3 per cent, the highest for seven years. In August, the trade deficit substantially worsened. Despite knowing Nigel Lawson’s intentions, Sir Alan Walters, the Prime Minister’s personal adviser, described the ERM as ‘half-baked’ in an article for the American Economist. There was an outcry and Mrs Thatcher faced calls to dismiss her adviser. Instead she stuck by him. She lost her Chancellor instead.

Nigel Lawson’s resignation was the greatest blow to Mrs Thatcher’s Government since Michael Heseltine’s dramatic walkout three years earlier.

Given Lawson’s position, it was altogether more serious and the issue was of rather greater magnitude than who owned Westland helicopters. The following morning the news was splashed across the front page with a large Richard Willson cartoon of Sir Alan Walters falling out of Lawson’s collapsing Budget briefcase. Thatcher’s decision to stick by Walters had not even saved his skin. His continuation as her adviser would have made life for Lawson’s successor all but untenable and he too opted to resign on what Philip Webster and Richard Ford’s report described as ‘a night of sensation’. ‘At 7.45 p.m. in one of the most astonishing scenes enacted in the Commons, Sir Geoffrey Howe, Deputy Prime Minister, told MPs of Lawson’s resignation,’ the report continued. John Major was promoted to fill Lawson’s shoes, despite the fact that he had only been made Foreign Secretary the previous month. Webster described Major as ‘one of the most respected Chief Secretaries in recent years’.[19]

Analysing the Lawson resignation, Robin Oakley wrote that although the immediate issue had concerned the differences between Howe and Lawson who supported ERM membership and Thatcher and Walters who did not, it had its roots in

Mrs Thatcher’s way of doing things. It is not a case of two people who had stuck together for the sake of the party finally being unable to bear the strain. Lawson was one of the group of four musketeers who used to work with Mrs Thatcher back in opposition days, feeding her the ammunition with which to make an impact at Prime Minister’s Question Time. Like Norman Tebbit, another of the four, he was a Thatcherite by conviction, a genuine soul mate.

They had come to find that ‘when things go wrong, they feel, she detaches herself from her ministers and talks about them as if they work for somebody else’. Now she had been forced to make Douglas Hurd Foreign Secretary. Given that he did not share her growing hostility to the European project, she would either have to concede political ground to him or retreat further ‘into the bunker with that small team of advisers’.[20]

In its leading column, The Times put loyalty to the Prime Minister before sensible analysis of what had happened. Minimizing the scale of the crisis, it suggested that Lawson’s departure solved the divisive cohabitation on economic policy. Praise for Lawson’s achievements was muted: ‘His strength of mind was admired, but he has yet to be forgiven for relaxing the fiscal reins last year and allowing the economy to overheat. To that extent his departure will actually strengthen the Government’s position.’[21] Three days later, the leading column, entitled ‘Panic Over’, went so far as to assure Tory backbenchers that ‘the drama is over’.[22]

With a challenge to her leadership on the horizon from the backbench ‘stalking horse’, Sir Anthony Meyer, Mrs Thatcher was interviewed by Robin Oakley and Nicholas Wood in The Times in November 1989. She implied she would fight not only the 1992 election as leader but also the 1997 contest ‘by popular acclaim’, as she put it (although she would be seventy-two by then). Her eventual successor, she hinted, would probably come from a younger generation (which, if she stayed on beyond 1997, could hardly be doubted). It was, as Oakley and Wood pointed out, ‘an astonishing move which can be expected to goad her opponents within the Conservative Party’.[23] In the short term, however, it did not fail. On 5 December, she saw off the ‘stalking horse’ without having to break into more than a canter. It would take someone altogether more substantial than Sir Anthony Meyer to see her off.

IV

In December 1988, The Times asked its foreign correspondents to speculate on what 1989 held in store. Roger Boyes came closest: ‘Romania and East Germany will have leadership crises this year. East Germany is particularly sensitive since there is real pressure for change from below on Herr Erich Honecker, age 75.’ As for Romania’s even more dictatorial ruler, Nicolae Ceausescu:

This may be the year of transition as the limits of his power are becoming evident and he has destroyed the machinery of succession …The real risk takers are Poland and Hungary, which are trying to run faster and faster to keep up with the rising expectations of their people … Hungary is galloping into the new world, with talk of a multi-party system and much else … the political implosion of neutral Yugoslavia will become a political factor in the rest of the Balkans; and debt-servicing will be a problem everywhere.[24]

Boyes was certainly well placed to observe a transforming moment in world history. It was Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to liberalize the Soviet Union that gave the peoples of Eastern Europe hope. Amazingly, The Times had been without a correspondent in Moscow for almost a year due to foot-dragging over giving a visa to Mary Dejevsky, who was Wilson’s choice to succeed Christopher Walker. Dejevsky’s record of writing critically about the Soviet regime told against her. Yet, if the Soviet authorities believed their stalling tactics in issuing a visa would encourage The Times to offer up a more amenable journalist instead, they were much mistaken. Wilson refused to play games, insisting that the choice of correspondent would not be a matter for the Soviet government. Undaunted, he even began planning during the summer of 1988 to send a team of Times writers over to the USSR to study the changes that were unfolding. Unusually, Mrs Thatcher intervened to secure The Times an interview with Gorbachev, her Private Secretary, Charles Powell, speaking to the Soviet Embassy on the matter with ‘the Prime Minister’s personal instruction’.[25] In April 1989, Wilson was among those Thatcher invited for dinner with Gorbachev.

Getting an inside perspective on the unfolding drama in the Soviet Union was, however, a difficult assignment. Briefly in Moscow in the summer of 1987, Mary Dejevsky had met up with Jewish refuseniks via intermediaries who would arrange to meet her in a specified carriage of a metro station before taking her to their whereabouts. Each had a story of persecution. For eighteen months between May 1988 and November 1989, The Times vainly attempted to get Dejevsky a visa. A one-month visa, granted as a goodwill gesture, was issued in December 1988, the words ‘only the truth’ written above the signature of the Soviet diplomat who issued it. On arrival, even her private telephone was audibly tapped. She had brought with her a Bible that she was going to give to a Moscow worker in a car plant who had written to The Times asking for one. ‘I handed him his Bible in an opaque, unpatterned carrier bag and we walked down the street, he marvelling that he could meet a Western correspondent without immediate arrest, I that so many precautions still had to be taken. Then we both heard the camera click from a shop window above us.’[26]

When Dejevsky finally got to take up residence in Moscow she still had little idea how long she would be allowed to stay. She was there at the sufferance of the Soviet authorities. Angus Roxburgh, the Sunday Times correspondent, had been expelled shortly before her arrival. Dejevsky pondered whether the authorities had deliberately deported Roxburgh so that she would not have a near colleague to compare notes with and in order to break all continuity in News International’s reporting operations. Taking up residence in the deserted Times flat in the security-enclosed foreigners compound in Moscow, Dejevsky added Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to the bookshelves. She sensed its contents might have contemporary resonance. In the event, she only got halfway through the first volume. The pace of reporting the Soviet empire’s implosion left her no time for perusing history books.

During the spring of 1989, the first Soviet multi-candidate elections for the Congress of People’s Deputies were held and Gorbachev rid the Soviet Central Committee of many of its old guard. His efforts to produce a new mood of openness in Soviet society were watched with the keenest interest. It had already made possible an extraordinary improvement in relations with the United States. In July 1987, the Kremlin had offered to dismantle medium- and short-range missiles from the USSR’s Asian states. The following month, Reagan had responded, suggesting a summit in Washington to ban intermediate nuclear weapons. On 8 December, agreement at Washington was signed, eliminating medium- and short-range nuclear missiles. It was the first mutually agreed disarmament treaty in history. The world appeared to be stepping away from the spectre of nuclear destruction.

Gorbachev, however, was concerned not only with extracting his country from the crippling cost of a nuclear arms race in which it was clear the Soviet Union could no longer compete. In May 1988, he began withdrawing Russian troops from their disastrous campaign in Afghanistan. The last of them was pulled out ignominiously in February the following year. By then Gorbachev had told the UN of his proposals to cut his armed forces by half a million men and to withdraw fifty thousand troops and five thousand tanks from Eastern Europe.

Yet, not everywhere Gorbachev went was he able to foster a new spirit of peace and harmony and those who thought the world was engaged in an overnight embrace of liberalism were about to be rudely jolted. Martial law had been declared in Peking (as The Times was still calling Beijing) on 20 May. However, the first serious attempt to enforce it had ended in embarrassment when five thousand inexperienced and nervous soldiers had failed to disperse a crowd of students and other protestors that appeared to be swelling towards 100,000 people. The massed demonstration in Tiananmen Square was particular embarrassing for the party leaders. They had become a focus for the world media, providing an extraordinary spectacle of nascent democracy. Art students had even erected ‘The Goddess of Democracy’ which consciously resembled the Statue of Liberty in the heart of the square. It was a mortifying spectacle for China’s leaders at a time when Gorbachev was visiting for talks. They decided they could tolerate it no longer.

On 5 June, The Times splashed its front page with the terrible consequences, ‘Peking protesters massacred: Thousands feared dead as tanks crush heroic resistance’. A photograph showed the tank-crushed corpses of students beside the twisted wreckage of their bicycles. The paper’s stringer in China, Catherine Sampson, had lain flat on her belly with her notebook from her position on the Peking Hotel’s balcony, from where she had watched the atrocity unfold before her eyes. Her report began, ‘The people of Peking last night continued their heroic but doomed resistance as some of the tanks and heavy artillery that had crushed the student protest movement less than 24 hours before patrolled the capital.’ Unofficial estimates of the death toll had passed one thousand. In the suburbs, university campuses and around the diplomatic quarter there were sporadic bursts of gunfire and resistance. In the darkness, chaos and panic, it was difficult to establish the exact course of events. ‘According to one account, tanks and armoured personnel carriers had driven on to the square, indiscriminately crushing the makeshift tents with students still inside. Another report said that when the students had filed out of the square, holding hands, troops had fired at them, felling the first row of 100, and then the second.’ The Goddess of Democracy was brought smashing down. Official news reports spoke only of the suppression of a ‘counter-revolutionary’ riot, without listing casualties.[27] Later, independent estimates suggested around 2600 had perished although nobody was ever really able to speak with authority on the final toll.

Sampson was so traumatized by the horror she had witnessed that, close to collapse, she caught a flight to Hong Kong to be with Mary Dejevsky (in her last weeks there before taking up residence in Moscow) who was filing valuable supplementary reports from the British colony. Dejevsky protected her (not least from an irate foreign desk at Wapping who felt she had deserted her post) and, several days later, Sampson summoned the courage to return to Peking where she reported on the ensuing crackdown. Dejevsky, meanwhile, had been stalwart not only in the defence of her distraught colleague but also on the pages of the newspaper (although Wilson was angry with her not being in situ in Peking). As the massacre unfolded, she immediately filed a comment article arguing that the deed would cause the Chinese government the loss of its people’s confidence as well as that of foreign investors and the nervous community in Hong Kong which was due to be transferred to Peking’s care in eight years time. ‘It could also strike the first nail in the coffin of Chinese communism,’ she wrote. ‘In Peking in the last three weeks I witnessed the spirit of hope and common purpose represented by the student protests. The barricades erected to keep the army out of the city were built and manned by ordinary people, not those of an anti-government persuasion.’[28]

The leading column was unsparing in its criticism. It was written by Rosemary Righter, a forthright intellect who exemplified the most noble traditions of ‘The Thunderer’. Righter was an accomplished duellist with the pen against tyranny’s swords. Deng Xiaoping, long seen as the leader of reform in China, had opted to hang ‘on to power at the expense of his own revolution’. The Times argued that Britain should review its 1984 agreement with China over Hong Kong, suspending negotiations on the Basic Law under which the colony was to be governed after the handover. For its part, the Hong Kong government should proceed without delay to introduce democratic institutions while, in Whitehall, the Home Office should review its policy on Hong Kong citizens’ entitlement to British residency.[29] When the Government subsequently insisted on restricting entitlement, The Times and, in particular its columnist Woodrow Wyatt, were appalled.

Would the Communist old guard clinging onto power in Eastern Europe crush the emerging voices of dissent with equal ruthlessness? On 4 June 1989, just as China’s rulers were ordering the suppression of the student protests, Solidarity swept to power in Poland’s first free elections since the Second World War and two months later its first post-war non-Communist prime minister took office. There was no bloodshed. Also that August two million people formed a human chain across the three Baltic republics to mark the fiftieth anniversary of their Soviet annexation. It was a potent message of dignified defiance to rule from Moscow. The winds of change were blowing across the continent. In September, Hungary opened its border with East Germany and within four weeks socialists had replaced Communists in power in Budapest.

The flow of migration from East Germany was turning into a flood. Yet, some felt that the events of the Second World War meant that the Soviet Union would never tolerate a united Germany and the toppling of the Communist emblem over East Berlin. As the pressures for political reform and migration mounted in East Germany, two fears loomed large: would its leaders crack down and, if they did not, would Moscow do so on its satellite’s behalf? Brezhnev’s intimidation of the government in Warsaw in the face of the rise of Solidarity in 1981 was one precedent. But the Brezhnev Doctrine of defending Marxist-Leninism in Eastern Europe, with tanks if necessary, appeared to have disintegrated. Gorbachev was made from more malleable metal. After all, Solidarity had been allowed to form a government in Warsaw. Indeed, far from having their resolve stiffened, the leadership in East Berlin came under pressure from Moscow to pursue a policy of glasnost rather than repression. That, at any rate, seemed to make more sense that risking a complete surrender to democratic forces that, if allowed to triumph, could even dismantle the Warsaw Pact, a risk Moscow was not prepared to countenance. The East German regime, however, appeared more resistant to glasnost than those who wielded power in the Kremlin. Alarmingly, Egon Krenz, who succeeded Erich Honecker in October 1989, had publicly supported the Chinese government’s massacre in Tiananmen Square.

No emblem was more totemic of the Cold War than the Berlin Wall. Two and a half million East Germans had fled to the West while the borders were porous between 1949 and 1961, when the wall was erected to stop them, officially as an ‘anti-fascist protection barrier’. Border guards operated a shoot-to-kill policy rescinded only in 1989. Presidents Kennedy and Reagan had both stood before it and condemned it in ringing tones of high oratory. Yet, on 9 November, astonishing news broke. The wall had been breached.

Although the East German politburo announced the wall would remain as a ‘reinforced state border’, the decision to open crossing points through which all the Democratic Republic’s citizens could pass from east to west spelt its doom. Whatever delusions were clung to by Krenz and his circle, The Times headline summed up the situation: ‘The Iron Curtain torn open: Berliners cross the Wall to freedom.’[30] A photograph showed Berliners actually standing on top of the heavily graffitied structure. Such was the rate of copy and pictures coming through to Wapping on the evening the wall fell that the front page was changed eight times over the course of the night. In nearly thirty-five years at the paper, Tim Austin looked back on it as the most memorable night at The Times.[31]

A tide of humanity poured across the border, propelled by curiosity, better shopping, the exercise of a new liberty formally denied or to visit relations they had been separated from for years or generations. Over the first weekend, two million East Germans crossed the border. Holes were widened to accommodate the torrent. Rather than waiting for official sanction, Berliners took chisels to sections. The mayors of the divided city shook hands. Krenz announced free elections. A quarter of East Germans asked for visas. Anne McElvoy led The Times’s reporting from East Berlin and she was soon joined by Michael Binyon who arrived in West Berlin in time to witness the influx of ‘Oesties’ claiming their one hundred Deutschmark (£34) ‘welcome money’ to spend. Many milled about ‘unsure of where they were going’, Binyon observed. ‘They had no idea where the streets went, as East German maps print West Berlin simply as a huge white space.’ For some, freedom meant licence. ‘One of the most popular attractions were the famous sex shops, which were doing a roaring trade.’ A photograph of Leipzigerstrasse showed East Berlin deserted.[32]

Unlike Poland, where there was Solidarity, or in so many other revolutions, the crumbling of Communist power in the German Democratic Republic was the result of mass action but not of an organized opposition. Anne McElvoy was quick to point out the irrelevance of ‘New Forum’, the hastily cobbled together rainbow alliance. ‘An organization which is still debating by lunchtime whether or not to let the Press watch its debate will take at least a year before it knows its own mind on anything else,’ she wrote, warning that ‘the call for free elections, however, is only meaningful if there are parties worthy to fight them’.[33] It was not exactly clear what East Germans wanted. Were they discontented with the politicians and their policies or did they actually want to replace the whole system of government? Within days the first banners demanding reunification were appearing at rallies in Leipzig, one of the centres for those agitating for reform. How strong the pressure for reunification was could not be easily gauged. Initial opinion polls suggested it was not strong and on 13 November The Times reported that ‘Herr Krenz, in his conversation with Herr Kohl, appears to have dismissed any talk of reunification’.[34]

Initially, West Germany’s Chancellor Kohl gave the public impression that reunification could be years away from realization. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher worried that a hasty endorsement of a united Germany would undermine Gorbachev and thereby hand back the Soviet Union to the rule of the hardliners. There were still 360,000 Soviet troops on East German soil and the other possible option for reuniting Germany – that it would leave NATO and become neutral – was also uncongenial to the Prime Minister’s way of thinking. As East Germany went to the polls for its first free elections in March 1990, Thatcher held a private summit to discuss the German question with a team of historians that included Lord Dacre and Norman Stone. Most of the conclusions were positive although the subsequent leaking of a memorandum drawn up listing supposed Germanic character traits made the Prime Minister appear to be trapped in a 1940s mindset. The East German elections, however, produced sensational results: with a turnout of over 90 per cent, the pro-unification Christian Democratled ‘Alliance for Germany’ won 48 per cent and the former Communists were reduced to 16 per cent. From this moment, there was no diverting the emotional tide for one Germany. In June, the Deutschmark became legal tender in the east. On 2 October, Germany was reunified. Anne McElvoy conveyed the scenes in Berlin as its two halves counted down the hours to becoming one again. ‘Music rang out on every street corner and fireworks lit up the sky over the Brandenburg gate,’ she reported. ‘Older Germans burst into tears as midnight approached. “This is the end of a long punishment for my country,” said an old man.’ The East German Volkskammer convened for its last session. The British, American and French flags were lowered, as the occupying powers ceded their authority to the new free state. The former Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, penned a column on the Op-Ed page, appealing to his British friends to prevent a new German financial superpower by endorsing a new European central bank and single currency. ‘Germany is reborn today, and Europe should rejoice,’ proclaimed the leading article written by Daniel Johnson, before proceeding to call for a wider European Community that should incorporate Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.[35] Enlargement of the EC became the Euro-sceptics’ solution to what was assumed would be a more powerful Germany just as the Euro-federalists believed the answer came in replacing the Deutschmark with the euro. In the event, both would follow.

The new Germany was, for the first time since the rise of Hitler, surrounded on all sides by democracies. A ‘Velvet Revolution’ had swept away Communist rule in Czechoslovakia in November 1989. Alexander Dubcek, hero of the Prague Spring, had addressed his first rally since the fateful days of 1968. On 10 December, the country’s first non-Communist government took office and two days before Christmas the playwright and victim of totalitarianism, Vaclav Havel, was declared the new President. Yet, while Prague celebrated the bloodless means through which it could re-engage with the rest of Europe, events were taking a very different turn in Romania. On 17 December 1989, there were massacres in the Transylvanian city of Timisoara, close to the country’s border with Yugoslavia. The Times was faced with a problem. Romania was clearly the lead story but with no reporter inside the country it had to rely on what Dessa Trevisan on the Yugoslav border and Ernest Beck on the Hungarian border were able to glean from a mixture of often second-hand accounts and rumour, together with what was being reported by Tanjug, the Yugoslav news agency. The Romanian state media was making no mention of any atrocities, focusing instead on the state visit to Iran of President Nicolae Ceausescu, the country’s ‘Conductor’. Of the available sources of information, Tanjug was the most reliable. Yugoslavia alone had a consulate in Timisoara. From there, unconfirmed reports were streaming in of a second Tiananmen Square massacre. Tanjug was reporting two thousand civilian deaths and the demolition of the city centre. The trouble had started when demonstrators had tried to block the eviction of a popular pastor, Laszlo Tokes, who had criticized Ceausescu’s persecution of the local Hungarian minority.

Romania was a country where even ownership of a typewriter was forbidden without a state licence. The Times was cautions about predicting Ceausescu’s demise, a leading article entitled ‘Balkan Caligula’ pointing out that whereas Gorbachev’s support for reform and refusal to enact the Brezhnev Doctrine had undermined the will of the rest of Eastern Europe’s regimes to cling to power at all costs, Ceausescu had isolated his country from Moscow’s political influence. Furthermore, ‘Romania lacks an obvious institution such as the Catholic Church in Poland around which popular discontent will clearly mobilize.’[36] Pessimism was understandable. Until July 1988, the United States had rewarded Romania with most favoured trading status. The country had paid off most of its debts to the West and the IMF and had embarked upon reducing trade dependence as well. Romania was in the unusual situation of being a creditor with net assets while its citizens lived in penury. Western leverage on Bucharest was thus all but nonexistent. On the Op-Ed pages, Mark Almond, the Oxford don and Romania specialist, warned that the lamb-like collapse of Communism elsewhere in Eastern Europe was likely to make Ceausescu even more inclined to tough it out. He would draw the parallel instead from the repressive successes of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Indeed, ‘the visit to Peking by President Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, will probably have persuaded Ceausescu that the US talks human rights but does business regardless. Gorbachev has now sent an envoy to Peking to pay his respects.’ Almond thought it possible that, ‘given Gorbachev’s growing domestic unpopularity and fundamental failure to reform the Soviet economy, the Ceausescus may still rule in Romania when perestroika is as fond a memory as the Prague Spring’.[37]

The hypothesis was perfectly plausible. However, Almond had overestimated both the intelligence and the tenacity of The Conductor. With news of the massacres at Timisoara spreading, Ceausescu returned to Bucharest from Tehran and called for a mass pro-government rally that he would address from the balcony of the presidential palace. With the hubris of a regime used to stage-managing emotion, the decision was taken to broadcast the performance live. It was a disastrous miscalculation. With the cameras rolling, the crowd did the unthinkable – Ceausescu was heckled mid-oration. Visibly losing control, he faltered and stepped back from the balcony. At this very moment, the live broadcast was cut.

As the television coverage came to its abrupt and alarming halt, The Times’s reporters were moving across the border. Peter Law arrived in Timisoara where the bodies of more than four thousand victims were being uncovered in a ditch. Michael Hornsby made straight for Bucharest. It seemed the Securitate had shot dead the Defence Minister ‘because he had tried to keep soldiers in their barracks’. Fighting was breaking out all over the city between insurgents and army units loyal to a regime whose leader had just been dramatically helicoptered off the roof of The Central Committee building to an unknown fate. The Securitate were using underground passageways to make a bloody stand in The Conductor’s absence. Back in Wapping, the dramatic, if conflicting, reports were contributing towards an equally dramatic front page. ‘Bloodbath in Bucharest’ ran the headline beside a photograph of cheering Romanian troops joining the revolt. It was an image that would not have looked out of place in a 1945 edition of Picture Post. A second photograph caught Ceausescu’s helicopter lifting off from the roof of the Central Committee building.[38]

On Christmas Day news spread that both Ceausescu and his hated wife Elena had been caught, tried for two hours and shot. Michael Hornsby travelled round a Bucharest that was increasingly under the control of the makeshift anti-Ceausescu alliance, the National Salvation Front. While some signs of normality had returned, there were also lynchings of Securitate members, Hornsby witnessing one of them being shot through the head with his own revolver. ‘Others were dragged from cars and beaten to death.’[39]

Whatever the scenes of summary justice in Bucharest, Christmas 1989 was celebrated across Europe with an unusual degree of hope, expectation and, for some, a measure of unease. The process would take another giant stride forward a mere five weeks into the new year when the Soviet Central Committee voted to end the USSR as a one-party state. For all its overuse, it was hard to avoid the metaphor of the toppling dominoes, as first Poland shrugged off Communist rule, then Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia. In the last days of the year it looked as if Romania, too, was poised to follow suit, albeit after blood on the streets. In fact, while it freed itself from the shadow of Ceausescu, it would shy away from electing a non-Communist government until November 1996. It had been a momentous last six months of 1989 nonetheless. When, back in July, Paris had celebrated the bicentenary of the French Revolution, world leaders had gathered there only six weeks after reform in China had been crushed at Tiananmen Square and half of Europe was still under Communist rule. Reflecting on the ‘Year of Revolution’, The Times observed, ‘For Europe, at least, the year of France’s revolutionary bicentennial has lived up to the nobler part of its inheritance.’[40]

It was an end to old certainties. The American academic Francis Fukuyama rushed to provide the first of a series of explanations. His suggestion that the world had reached the ‘end of history’ naturally attracted considerable attention. According to Fukuyama, the future might contain all manner of trouble and strife, but it would not be an ideological battle of wills because the world had arrived at a point where it was merely divided between those countries that had embraced liberalism, those that were in the course of doing so and those for which the day could not long be postponed. Only a few small states with crank rulers still failed to acknowledge that liberal values were not, at least in principle, a good thing. This theory would soon be put to a sterner test by the re-emergence of Islamic fundamentalism, leading other theorists to warn that the world was, in fact, in thrall to a ‘clash of civilisations’. This, however, was for the future. Among those in The Times who rejected the Fukuyama theory when it was first expounded in 1989 was the Oxford philosopher John Gray who thought not that history had ended but rather that it would rediscover its old rhythms:

The aftermath of totalitarianism will not be a global tranquilization of the sort imagined by American triumphalist theorists of liberal democracy. Instead, the end of totalitarianism in most of the world is likely to see the resumption of history on decidedly traditional lines: not the history invented in the hallucinatory perspectives of Marxism and American liberalism, but the history of authoritarian regimes, great-power rivalries, secret diplomacy, irredentist claims and ethnic and religious conflicts. It is to this world, harsh but familiar, that we are now returning, and for whose trials we should be preparing.[41]

Daniel Johnson, who joined The Times in the new year, wondered whether a diminution of the ideological struggle between capitalism and Communism would topple the primacy of socio-economic historical interpretation in favour of biography and the theory of the ‘great man’. ‘Over the last decade,’ he noted, ‘several personalities have emerged in Eastern Europe who seem to possess that titanic quality which the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt defined as historische Grösse: Gorbachev, Walesa, Havel.’[42] Yet, not even the great men in the last decade of the century appeared able to contain all the tides that swelled around them. Nationalism was replacing Communism in Eastern Europe and was tearing apart the multi-ethnic Soviet Union. Communism in Eastern Europe, it now seemed, had only been sustained for so long by the acknowledged reality that there was a Soviet army of occupation ready to enforce it. It collapsed as soon as its citizens and leaders alike realized that the Brezhnev Doctrine was dead. Bernard Levin wrote, ‘the moment Mr Gorbachev made clear that whatever happened in the evil empire he would not lift a finger to help the colonial rulers, he had done the deed – the irreversible deed – that would put paid to communism not only in its colonies but in the mother country itself’.[43] Conor Cruise O’Brien shared this analysis, but believed that these same forces would not triumph in China. There, the situation was different because the army, like the regime, was Chinese. Indeed, much of the armed forces personnel were drawn from the villages where 80 per cent of the population lived. They were far removed from the Western values of the chattering minority in the cities, let alone the students who had been to the fore in Tiananmen Square.[44]

The world had been transformed in a matter of weeks. Reporting revolution on this scale was an enormous test for The Times, as for the other papers. Analysis was difficult and speculation about the future almost cavalierly hazardous. Some believed the Independent had provided the best coverage of European Communism’s collapse. David Walker, a Times dissident who defected to the Guardian, noted that ‘during German unification, for example, it was striking how Die Welt cited as a matter of habit not The Times but the Independent’s views’.[45] Nonetheless, re-examining the paper during this period, The Times’s coverage appears impressive. Young and thoughtful reporters like Anne McElvoy provided excellent copy from Berlin. Mark Almond offered weighty analysis on the Op-Ed page. Naturally, the paper’s first task of analysis was to assess how the upheavals would shape Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the years ahead. It took longer to appreciate that the end of the Cold War would also dramatically change the nature of politics in Western Europe, Britain and the rest of the world. Political parties would have to adapt to new priorities among the voters and there was much (exaggerated) talk of a peace dividend in which huge savings from cutting defence spending could be redirected towards public services. For many in Britain, Margaret Thatcher’s unease about German reunification and opposition to deeper integration in the European Community jarred with the spirit of the moment, where European brotherhood animated those with hopes for a continent reborn. French political calculations were perhaps more cynical – the price for a reunited Germany was the abolition of the Deutschmark and the pressing ahead with European economic and monetary union. This ensured that the politics of Western Europe rather than those of the newly liberated Eastern European states would continue to dominate the news and comment pages of The Times in the 1990s. Whether a more deeply integrated European Community would facilitate reaching out across the shattered Iron Curtain to a wider Europe beyond remained to be seen.

V

While the editor made preparations for a new decade with his usual unflagging drive and enthusiasm, there was much he could look back upon in the past eighteen months with quiet satisfaction. In particular, the Saturday paper had undergone a remarkable expansion. The Times had long been a paper that serious-minded people took with them to work and this was reflected in the circulation figures. Sales had been much better during the weekdays than at the weekends. Enhancing Saturday’s sale would need significant investment but advertisers had traditionally been shy of investing in Saturday journalism, preferring the graphic-friendly glossy magazines of the Sunday papers or the daily certainties of the weekday offerings. The paper that did most to change this formula was the Financial Times. Although not naturally thought of as the journal with which to relax at the weekend, the FT successfully reinvented itself on Saturdays, pioneering the two-section format that emphasized lifestyle-focused journalism. In particular, it had a strong property section. So successful was this weekend edition that the paper began selling more on Saturdays than it did during the week. The Telegraph followed suit. Clearly there was a waiting market ripe to be explored and exploited. In Charles Wilson, The Times was fortunate to have an editor who understood the challenge.

By the end of 1988, all the national broadsheets had additional weekend sections for the Saturday editions. The Independent was the last to do so, but the launch of its second section and a weekend magazine edited by Alexander Chancellor in September 1988 made an immediate impact. Wilson’s strategy was different. Rather than introduce a colour magazine he opted to produce a four-section, sixty-four-page edition for Saturdays, one section of which was gravure-printed in colour. There was more of virtually everything too. A family money section took the place of what, during the week, was devoted to company business news. Readers were guided through the proliferation of financial services designed to make every last drop of savings go further. Apart from anything else, this was popular with the advertisers. Where, previously, the ‘Saturday’ section had merely been tagged onto the main part of the paper, ‘Review’ became a distinct third section covering the arts, live performances and books. Previewing sporting events rather than just providing match reports for the Monday paper ensured that Saturday’s fourth section, covering sport and leisure, was also much more comprehensive than what had been offered in the past. Francesca Greenoak was given more room to tend her gardening column and the general layout was greatly enhanced with watercolour illustrations by Diana Ledbetter. It no longer looked like a grubby old piece of inky newsprint. Indeed, in the last two years of the 1980s, two areas of the paper’s Saturday journalism were especially developed: the property section (unfortunately just in time for the market downturn) and the travel pages. In the latter case, the transformation was especially remarkable. What had previously amounted to a couple of articles surrounded by a stamp album of small monochrome ads for weekends in Torquay or Le Touquet sprouted into several pages in which travel writers explored increasingly exotic locations. The quality of the accompanying photography also became more artistic and alluring. This expansion was overseen by the travel editor, Shona Crawford Poole, who had previously been The Times cookery writer. Providing the weekend recipes in her place had become Frances Bissell’s responsibility while Jane MacQuitty continued to write expertly every Saturday about wine, a task she had been performing without let or hindrance since 1982. Jonathan Meades wrote the restaurant reviews. An atheist of the militant variety, Meades had gone from a minor West Country public school (another bugbear) to RADA ‘at the fag end of the Sixties’. But waning aspirations towards the stage were quashed comprehensively by Hugh Cruttwell, RADA’s principal, who all too plausibly assured Meades that he had little future until he reached middle age, at which point he would make a good living as a character actor.[46] At thirty-nine, Meades was still approaching this age when he was signed up by The Times in 1986, having spent the intervening fifteen years writing for various magazines including Time Out, Tatler and Harpers & Queen. Although Wilson regretted Meades’s ‘vituperative excesses’ and the amount of column inches he devoted to damning wherever he had been let loose upon,[47] few could doubt that he was an acute critic of the choicest vintage and a writer of exceptional flair and originality. One pub in East Anglia erected a ‘Shrine of Hatred’ to Meades after a particularly excoriating review.

The Times was broadening its appeal but, given the improving quality of the competition, it had to do this merely to stand still. Wilson’s choice as the editor of the Saturday features section, Richard Williams, decided that he preferred the look of the competition and departed for the newly launched (and short-lived) Sunday Correspondent. Wilson, who hated losing old comrades, tried to dissuade him and even got Murdoch to offer him a job at Sky, the satellite television company he had launched eight months earlier in February 1989. Williams declined. Indeed, Sky had been one of the contributing factors in Williams’s decision to leave The Times after thirteen years writing for the paper. In June, after only two months in his post as arts editor, Tim de Lisle had resigned over what he considered the misuse of the arts pages to promote Sky. He had spent an agreeable Bank Holiday Monday afternoon watching a one-day match at Lord’s only to discover on his return to Wapping that Mike Hoy had run an advertising puff for a competition across all eight columns of the top of the arts page. Tied in with Sky’s forthcoming televising of a popular opera production of Carmen, the prize was a satellite dish. De Lisle attempted a damage-limitation operation, cutting down the size of the Sky logo and subsequently demoting down the page the Carmen review. This sparked a shouting match with – or rather from – Wilson. De Lisle defended his action by saying he was attempting to save the credibility of the paper. Wilson interpreted this to mean he had used non-objective criteria in laying out the content of his page. De Lisle removed himself to the Telegraph and eventually became editor of Wisden. It was The Times’s loss. Yet the matter was a particularly unfortunate one. News Corp.’s finances were being stretched to the limit by the purchase of what would become the Fox network in the United States as well as by the launch of Sky in Britain. As the economy turned downwards and banks began calling in their loans, it became increasingly possible that News Corp. might go bankrupt. Some journalists were outraged that Wilson appeared to be compromising the integrity of The Times by providing Sky with what looked like free advertising. The Times’s NUJ chapel asked the board of independent directors to examine whether this constituted a breach of the 1981 undertakings Murdoch had made on preserving the paper’s editorial independence. Approaches were also made to the Department of Trade and Industry, the Monopolies Commission and the Office of Fair Trading. The independent directors refused to investigate, on the grounds that they only had a remit to do so if the editor asked for it. The editor did not ask for it. One of the directors, the Earl of Drogheda, attempted to calm tempers with the explanation, ‘the editor assures us there has been no such interference’. However, de Lisle’s self-sacrifice was not in vain. The Times was subsequently much more careful about how it covered Sky.[48]

Those who left the chaos of the attempted Daily and Sunday Telegraph merger in 1989 were horrified by the atmosphere and low morale they encountered on arrival at the rum warehouse. Whenever there was breaking news, Wilson would become a galvanizing force, demonstrating his mastery of command. Journalists who came to him with personal problems were usually treated with sympathy and kindness.[49] But on a day-to-day basis, working successfully with the editor necessitated an imperviousness to jibes and cutting comments. He took to perpetually calling one reporter ‘Fingertips’ – on the grounds that these were all he was hanging onto his job with. His standard rebuttal to any suggestion or idea he did not like was ‘the readers of The Times don’t want to read about … [followed by whatever had been proposed]’. The readers of The Times and Charles Wilson appeared to have a lot in common. Problematically, many of the more traditional Times hacks believed that this relationship existed only in the editor’s imagination. His habit of jabbing a finger at whomever he was addressing lacked insouciance. It was only after much experience that journalists realized his technique of invading their personal space during these dressing downs was only partly a form of intimidation; he was also attempting to discover if they had been drinking at lunchtime. It had certainly been a mistake in the early days of his editorship to inform the fashion editor, Suzy Menkes, that the actress Ali McGraw had an insufficient cleavage for the photographs lined up for the fashion page. This was not in the spirit of the journal of record. Indeed, women journalists particularly disliked his vernacular powers of expression. For a Scot, his use of the English language could be distinctly Anglo-Saxon.

Wilson’s many private kindnesses, his vitality and drive, were being overlooked by those who had become tired of his brusque jocularity and his tendency to dismiss or ridicule ideas and propositions without appearing to weigh them properly first. His energy could also be a stimulant for those around him. While many previous editors could have waxed lyrical about what policies had to be enacted in some far-off part of the world they were easily thrown into confusion when confronted by a locked door. Wilson, however, was not the sort of man ineffectually to ask another member of staff if they could go and search somewhere for a key. When on one occasion he turned up for a meeting to find the conference room locked, he merely took a couple of steps back, sized up the narrow gap between the top of the wall and ceiling, leapt up and shinned over a ten-foot-high partition to get in and open the door from the inside. Those who missed this impressive display of their editor’s athleticism were at least left to admire its legacy – a series of footprint dents going up the wall. In all his years editing from a rocking chair, William Rees-Mogg never left such an impression.

Wilson had hired some of the finest journalists on the paper, including Graham Paterson, a well-rounded and enthusiastic journalist brimming with ideas, and Mary Ann Sieghart, a young and energetic Op-Ed editor committed to dispelling the belief that the comment pages had fallen into the hands of a Margaret Thatcher support group. He was, however, hampered by the departure of Peter Stothard for Washington DC, in September 1989 when he took up the post of US editor. Stothard retained the somewhat honorary status as deputy editor of the paper, but his removal from Wapping was a handicap for Wilson. Although Murdoch only visited The Times five or six times a year, he was aware that there were rumblings of discontent. The two men would, however, speak once a week on the telephone. Wilson enjoyed these chats, which tended to be an opportunity to gossip about the national political scene rather than to map out the future of the paper. ‘We had a good relationship’ was how he later summed up his dealings with Murdoch, ‘and I would have walked on hot coals for him because I admired him then and admire him now.’[50]

For his part, Murdoch considered Wilson ‘a hardworking, brilliant, technical journalist like Harry [Evans] but much more decisive’.[51] He certainly owed Wilson a great deal as the lieutenant who had done so much to make the Wapping revolution possible and who had begged, cajoled and inspired Times journalists to be a part of it. Yet it was because so many of the older hands at The Times and in the industry at large regarded Wilson as one of Murdoch’s lieutenants that they wanted a new editor who was seen to be utterly removed from the corporate identity of News International. Even Murdoch came to accept some of the criticisms, later commenting that Wilson ‘didn’t have enough respect at the intellectual end of the paper. He was trying to recruit good people but couldn’t get them – which was the test.’[52] If The Times had still been competing against its old rivals, the Telegraph and the Guardian, all might have been well. But it was Wilson’s misfortune that the Independent had arrived and was offering journalists who did not like being shouted at in Glaswegian an alternative and highly respectable berth. During 1989, the financial fate of News International and its parent company, the News Corporation, hung in the balance. Rumours that it was about to collapse were rife. Clifford Longley, Mary Ann Sieghart and (prior to his departure) Richard Williams decided that Murdoch’s problems were The Times’s opportunity. The three of them began holding private meetings, rather in the manner that Andreas Whittam Smith, Matthew Symonds and Stephen Glover had done in planning the Independent when they were still employed by the Telegraph. Longley had already talked the situation over with Sir Gordon Borrie, the director-general of the Office of Fair Trading. Together, Longley, Sieghart and Williams drew up proposals to buy The Times from News International with the intention of re-establishing it along the lines of the (profitable) business structure that had been adopted by the Independent. They approached John Nott, the chairman and chief executive of Lazard Brothers merchant bank, and took soundings from venture capitalists. The response was that the prospectus looked favourable, but it was dependent on Murdoch agreeing to sell. Bravely, Sieghart and Williams decided to go and see him. He listened carefully to their sales pitch, interjecting only with the occasional facial wince. Then he said ‘no’. He would not sell. He did, however, ask what they thought was wrong with the paper and was given a fulsome account of its deficiencies compared to the Independent and the feeling that it was time for a new editor.[53] The points were noted.

Wilson’s nemesis appeared shortly thereafter in the guise of Andrew Knight who Murdoch poached from the Telegraph Group as the new executive chairman of News International in March 1990. When Knight arrived for his first day at Wapping, Wilson telephoned his office at ten in the morning asking to speak to him. He wanted to welcome him and let him know how much he was looking forward to working with him. Knight’s secretary said he was ‘tied up’ and would return Wilson’s call when he was free. When he had heard nothing from his new chief executive by lunchtime, Wilson telephoned again and was met with the same reply. He tried again as soon as the afternoon conference was over. Again Knight was too busy to talk to the editor of his group’s flagship title. At about 6.30 p.m. Wilson received a call, but it was from Murdoch’s secretary. She informed him that he had flown into London and wanted to see him at his flat at 8.30 the following morning. ‘I said “fine”,’ Wilson recalled, ‘and I knew that my term was over.’ That night he dined for the first time with Neil Kinnock. The bitterness and division of the Wapping dispute had prevented the Leader of the Opposition from being seen breaking bread with the editor of The Times for four years. Fittingly, the occasion, long in the planning, had been organized by Brenda Dean’s husband. The dinner was à deux. The sons of miners got on extremely well, musing on how two men from the same background could have ended up with such different political views. Wilson said nothing about the great issue preying on his mind. It was, he rued, a ‘lovely evening’.[54]

The next morning, Murdoch, looking somewhat embarrassed, told Wilson that Andrew Knight wanted a change – he wanted to make Simon Jenkins editor. What was more, Knight wanted Jenkins in Wilson’s chair with immediate effect. Wilson was able to extend this to the end of the week, a minor dignity that was the least he was owed. Murdoch wanted to offer more. The fall of the Berlin Wall had opened up seemingly tremendous business opportunities in the former Eastern Europe. There were newspapers with huge circulations that were – it was reasonably assumed – ineptly run and in need of the Murdoch touch. He wanted to make Wilson his East European emissary, or ‘International Director’. It appeared to be an intriguing opportunity but if it did not work out by the end of the year he assured Wilson that it would not harm his remaining three-year contract. Murdoch had a reputation for the presumptuous manner in which he sacked long-serving officers, but he also had a record for generosity and consideration in devising the financial terms of the divorce. Wilson stepped over and shook on it. He was back at Wapping in time for the morning conference where he announced he would be stepping aside and that the new editor was Simon Jenkins.

For Wilson, life after The Times took some unforeseen twists. It quickly became apparent that News Corp. was in mounting trouble and having difficulty rolling over its debts. One consequence was that fresh investment dried up. Wilson’s mission to Eastern Europe increasingly resembled a posting to Siberia. He did not have the budget to make major acquisitions. Murdoch’s mooted purchase of Pravda was out of the question. Wilson considered buying another Russian paper, Argumenti i Fakti, which had a 33.5 million circulation, the largest in the world. ‘We could have bought it for peanuts,’ he lamented, but the cash was not forthcoming even for that level of investment. When Robert Maxwell telephoned and offered him the editorship of the Sporting Life, allowing him to pursue his great love of the Turf, he accepted. Wilson began a new life as an executive in Mirror Group newspapers, becoming managing director in 1992. Some of his old Times colleagues raised their eyes to the heavens, murmuring that the appointment only showed what an inappropriate choice he had once been to guide the fortunes of The Times. Yet Maxwell was to provide a path back into the broadsheet press. In 1995, the Independent that had caused him so much anguish during his Times editorship appeared close to collapse, battered by a price war unleashed by Murdoch and ailing from the costs of subsidizing its unprofitable sister, the Independent on Sunday. Its new co-owner, the Mirror Group, appointed Wilson to spend six months as the Independent’s de facto editor with a remit to cut costs before passing onto the thirty-six-year-old Andrew Marr. Inevitably, some who had loved the Independent in its glorious early days saw Wilson as a terrible nemesis, brought in to wreak havoc upon his one-time tormentor.

Under Wilson, The Times had become less of an institution and more of a newspaper. Its future would have been far more precarious if its editor had pursued any other course. Wilson had Harold Evans’s flair for breaking news – clearing the top half of the paper for a dramatic photograph of the space shuttle exploding even before the image was available, for example. Indeed, he was at his best when disasters struck. On these occasions he immediately assumed total mastery of the situation, deploying people to specific tasks with almost military self-assurance. It was typical of him to see things clearly in a crisis. This skill turned out to be an important asset, since his editorship coincided with some terrible disasters: in May 1987 the Herald of Free Enterprise sank off Zeebrugge drowning 188 and in December a Philippines ferry sank with 1500 on board, the twentieth-century’s worst maritime disaster; the following year the Piper Alpha oil rig exploded killing 166, an Armenian earthquake killed 70,000 and two weeks later Pan Am flight 103, with 258 passengers on board, was blown up by a bomb over Lockerbie, killing a further eleven on the ground. Philip Howard regarded the moment Wilson unsentimentally jettisoned several pages of carefully prepared pre-Christmas quality writing in order to make way for fast and comprehensive coverage of the Lockerbie disaster to be the defining moment when the old Times – careful, judicious, slow to judge – died. The observation was not wholly intended as a criticism.[55] ‘He was the very best kind of tabloid journalist,’ commented Richard Williams, ‘and when he was able to bring this to bear on the paper’s news coverage it was just what The Times needed.’[56]

On the debit side, Wilson had driven away key intellectuals, losing some of the paper’s weight in the process. The leader writers were no longer privately referred to as the college of cardinals. Wilson was not someone who conveyed an air of spiritual benediction. But he had brought to the paper new talents, like Matthew Parris and Mary Ann Sieghart, who soon came to be seen as essential. Yet, while some of the old guard may have taken offence, Wilson’s dragging The Times, kicking and screaming, to places it had little natural inclination to go was not necessarily proof that he was a bad parent to the paper. ‘Unless you broadened the audience of The Times,’ he made clear, ‘the paper was going to die.’ He taught The Times to ‘recognize that half of the people who walk round the cities of this country are women’.[57] Married to the magazine editor Sally O’Sullivan, he had a better sense of what women wanted and this was recognized in the way features developed during his editorship. Fashion was given a higher profile and news was not restricted to party political subject matter – which had preoccupied so much of the paper’s column inches in the past. Like Harold Evans, he was criticized by those who believed The Times was, or ought to be, the home of the crafted essay rather than the ticker-tape machine for breaking news. Sir John Junor in the Mail on Sunday and Edward Pearce in the Guardian wrote articles defending him from what they saw as the snobbish sentiments of those who believed he had never been cut from The Times cloth. He had, they wrote, helped to make the paper more professional and freed it from the cult of deference. These were important achievements.

Much though Wilson had wanted to soldier on, his sacking came at an opportune moment. Although formalities had not been concluded, the Cold War had been won and with it the comment pages of The Times needed to adjust to a new era. Similarly, on the domestic front the Thatcher revolution in which Wilson had played his part was collapsing amid the rancour and ruin of the poll tax; the Prime Minister only had eight more bruising months left in Downing Street. At home and abroad, a more emollient style appeared to be required for the future. By contrast, Wilson appeared too closely identified with the decade of struggles – epitomized by the siege of Wapping – that had now drawn to a close. It was time for a change. What was more, he was leaving the paper at an opportune moment in other respects too. News Corp., its parent company, was plunging into a dire financial crisis. During 1990, it looked as if the whole empire might collapse. Cuts would be needed across the board. It was Simon Jenkins who would have to wield the axe.

CHAPTER NINE

SIMON JENKINS

Taking on the Independent; Thatcher to Major; War in the Gulf;

News Corp. on the Brink; Redesigning The Times;

the Jenkins Experiment Cut Short

I

‘The chattering classes will love it’ was Murdoch’s verdict on his choice of Simon Jenkins as the new editor of The Times.[1] This was not meant as a barbed observation. The excesses of the tabloid press – and not least of the Sun – had alienated sections of the public and the Government. There was even the prospect of legislation to tighten the fetters on press freedom. To this possibility, Murdoch was vehemently opposed and his appointment of the urbane and Establishment-minded Andrew Knight as News International’s executive chairman reflected a desire to emphasize the company’s commitment to quality journalism. Knight had been editor of The Economist between 1974 and 1986. For the last seven of those years, Jenkins had been the journal’s political editor and Knight had formed a high opinion of his skills.

Many senior journalists would have made strenuous efforts to publicize their suitability to edit The Times, but Murdoch and Knight were drawn to Simon Jenkins precisely because of his ambivalence towards the paper. This was not because of any unworldliness or lack of drive. Born in 1943, the son of a Welsh Congregationalist minister, the Revd Daniel Jenkins, who was one of the most acclaimed nonconformist theologians of the twentieth century, Simon Jenkins had graduated from St John’s College, Oxford, with ambitions to be either a politician or an academic. Journalism, he decided, was the best way of being both. After spells at the Times Educational Supplement, the Evening Standard and the Sunday Times, he became editor of the Evening Standard in 1976. Thirty-three was a precocious age to take the helm of a paper that was battling against a hostile takeover from its London rival, the Evening News. Jenkins saw off the predator and, in large part, saved the Standard’s existence. His reward was to be sacked by the paper’s new owners, Trafalgar House. By comparison, The Economist proved an agreeably monastic environment but in 1986 he swapped it for the besieged stockade of Wapping, joining the Sunday Times as a columnist and as creator and editor of its relaunched books section. In late 1989 he decided to quit in order to become a columnist for the Independent instead. It was the decision that was to make him The Times’s editor. When Murdoch heard the news that Jenkins had been poached by the Independent he asked him to call round for a chat. To Murdoch’s questioning as to why he wanted to leave the News International stable, Jenkins replied that he thought the Independent was a paper that was making great strides forward and the one he most admired. Murdoch asked what was wrong with The Times. Jenkins was unsparing in his analysis. The fault, he claimed, was not with Charles Wilson but rather with the strategy Murdoch had set out for him – which was to go after the Daily Telegraph’s market. This had been a mistake and, given that circulation was gently sliding, it was not even commercially sensible. The only future for The Times was to be like itself, or rather, its former self. This had become more difficult because, while it had been busy focusing on the Telegraph, it had left itself open to attack on its flank from Whittam Smith’s new paper. Disastrously, the Independent was now claiming all the traditional Times territory and was increasingly taking its readers too. The Independent, therefore, was the paper for which Jenkins wished to be a columnist. Murdoch was not unreceptive to the points being made, even though they represented a critical judgment on his long-standing strategy to target the Telegraph’s market. The Independent had indeed seized the opportunity to occupy some of The Times’s ground. Partly this had been a by-product of the legacy of Wapping – which made starting new newspapers like the Independent a much less expensive proposition while simultaneously dumping public opprobrium on Murdoch whose image, in return for making this revolution possible, was now associated with violence, mass sackings and callous Thatcherite zeal. Clearly, he was not going to persuade Jenkins to jilt the firm offer of a column in the Independent for one in The Times, so he decided on an altogether higher pitch. He suggested Jenkins turn The Times into the sort of paper for which he would want to write a column – by becoming its editor. It was a rare journalist who was offered an editorship on such complimentary terms. Nonetheless, Jenkins made clear he would only accept on the condition that Murdoch left him alone to do it his way even if, in the short term, circulation continued to slide. He demanded absolute carte blanche. ‘Give me two years,’ Jenkins requested. Murdoch consented and the deal was done. That evening, Jenkins returned home to talk matters over with his wife, the Texan-born actress Gayle Hunnicutt. He explained the hard task that lay ahead and the conditions upon which he had agreed to work. ‘After three years that will be it,’ Jenkins assured her, ‘because after three years it’s either the paper I want to write a column for, in which case I want to write a column for it, or I will have failed.’[2]

II

Few editorial appointments could have been greeted with greater pleasure from journalists, even those writing their tributes in rival newspapers. Almost all agreed that Simon Jenkins was the man to restore The Times’s authority. The news crossed the Atlantic. The writer Julian Barnes assured readers of the New Yorker that Jenkins’s appointment was an appropriate metaphor: ‘He first made his name in the early Seventies as a journalist campaigning to save bits of London from the property developers, and helped found an organisation called Save Britain’s Heritage. Now he has been handed the biggest heritage-saving job of his career.’[3]

Jenkins was a son of the cloth. His love of ecclesiastical architecture (he was subsequently the author of England’s Thousand Best Churches which became a bestseller in 1999) was matched by an interest in making The Times once again the paper of choice, from the bishop’s palace to the provincial vicarage. He considered Whittam Smith to be an editor exuding ‘Episcopalian’ rectitude. Yet, the problem was not confined even to the Established religion. ‘It was significant to me,’ he later recalled, ‘that the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Basil Hume, had told all his people that henceforth he would write letters to the Independent not The Times if he wanted to communicate something.’ Jenkins set himself a mission to reconvert such backsliders. Recommunicating with the more godless opinion formers was equally pressing. ‘I hadn’t realised quite how much The Times was hated,’ he confessed. ‘The way the BBC treated the Murdoch press at that time was simply outrageous.’ This was not paranoia. The BBC had all but ceased citing The Times on round-ups of the morning’s papers and Times staff were rarely invited onto any programme. This was not a verdict on them or their writing, as Jenkins discovered whenever he complained and received a long and politically tendentious monologue about ‘the Murdoch press’ in response.[4] The BBC, it seemed, was still implementing the siege of Wapping ‘boycott’ a full four years after the print unions had abandoned it.

The two main types of reader Jenkins wanted to attract back to The Times were those he considered core not only to its circulation but also to its soul. The first was ‘the London administrative Establishment’. This group read the paper more for the valuable information it contained than for any particular pleasure. The second group were readers who were generally right of centre in their political views but who were not employed by Government institutions. They nonetheless considered themselves more literary, metropolitan and cosmopolitan than those who subscribed to the Telegraph. Attracting them back, without losing readers who liked Wilson’s more news-orientated paper, would determine whether circulation held up. This matter could not be disregarded in the headlong race to appeal to a relatively small elite. There were only twenty thousand sales separating the Independent, The Times and the Guardian. The latter was two thousand sales a day ahead of The Times while the Independent was hard on The Times’s heels. Becoming the fourth best-read broadsheet in Britain (with a consequent fall-off in advertising rates) was not an accolade Jenkins wanted to win for his new paper, but unless he could provide dramatic results there was every likelihood that this would be its fate. On his arrival at Wapping, Jenkins summoned his staff onto the news floor and explained to them where he was seeking to position the paper. His speech was short on complacency. Certainly there was a threat on news coverage from the Telegraph and on arts and opinion in the Guardian. ‘But,’ he maintained, ‘there is only one paper which, five years ago, put its tanks on our lawn and that is the Independent … the Independent is our prime target.’ The Times would respond by going back upmarket. An impulsive cheer rang out along the length of the building.

The new editor had very clear ideas about what ‘going upmarket’ involved. It meant less sensationalism. This would involve reducing the size and temper of the headlines as well as writing that was phrased in a more considered and overtly objective style. It would mean fewer but longer articles rather than journalists’ copy being hacked into bite-sized morsels. The latter had become all to prevalent over the previous years and was exemplified when David Watts, the paper’s Tokyo correspondent, was asked to file two hundred words on the subject of one-hour ‘love hotels’, a cultural phenomenon related to Japanese society’s absence of privacy that demanded the sort of long, reflective 1500-word examination for which space had rarely been forthcoming.[5] Jenkins was particularly concerned by what he considered the deteriorating standard of English in the paper. The Times had once been held up to schoolchildren as a model for grammatical correctness. This tradition had ceased due to what the new editor put down to simple sloppiness. He told his staff that he demanded writing that ‘will lift the hearts of readers … we can more or less correct bad writing; we can edit it down. We cannot correct bad [sub]editing and we have got to pay particular attention to the presentation of writing in the paper. There simply must be no excuse for misprints, misspellings, stylistic errors, solecisms in The Times.’[6]

This, indeed, was to be the launch of a crusade that in the months ahead was to do more to cause ructions between editor and staff than possibly any other decision from the chair. Jenkins’s announcement that it would be a disciplinary offence for any journalist – sub or otherwise – to let a major error pass into print was to cause much discontent and even fear. Some felt that the editor’s definition of a major error included many examples that justified a groan and a quick verbal rebuke rather than a formal written warning. Slang or casual sentence construction was regarded as well within the danger zone. When Jenkins asked Clifford Longley to send a formal warning to whoever wrote ‘disintering’ in an article he had just spotted four months after the event, Longley wrote back pointing out that the author was none other than Simon Jenkins, adding, somewhat cheekily, ‘in the circumstances I see no point in asking you to regard this memo as a rebuke, despite your instruction’.[7] The threat of disciplinary action against anyone responsible for an error was particularly poor for morale on the backbench and on the subs’ tables generally. Jenkins did not especially care if this made him unpopular, seeing it as his duty to save the paper’s reputation rather than to win the bonhomie of his subs. Yet, what the reader gained in better and more accurately written prose was sometimes lost on occasions when so much time was spent scanning for mistakes that deadlines for the foreign, Scottish and West Country editions were missed.

Updating the in-house ‘style guide’ was central to ensuring higher standards were met. Jenkins formed a doctrinal conclave of Philip Howard and Bernard Levin to rule on matters of truth and error. However, frequent log jam between the two – who had different ideas about questions of linguistic discipline – ensured that Jenkins ended up making a lot of the judgments himself at a time when he was already extremely busy on the other daily aspects of the paper. The result was a huge improvement on the old greying handbooks of the 1970s that it superseded. Not only did it lay down good basic ground rules for how journalists should write, it included quirky details and elegant forms of writing. Ultimately, though, its idiosyncrasies proved too great and it was comprehensively rewritten by Tim Austin as soon as Jenkins ceased to be editor. It was, at least, a start. While some resented the lengths to which he went, there could be no doubt that the new editor was right to prioritize an area whose failings had caused disproportionate offence to the paper’s core highly educated readership and left the impression that The Times was indifferent to proper standards and questions of accuracy. True to his word on headline and design sensationalism, Jenkins’s eye for linguistic detail was also matched by his visual awareness. In this, he was an editor in the tradition of Harold Evans. He immediately asked David Driver to redesign the paper to make it look more sober and elegant. Its more populist lapses were de-sensationalized. Headlines were reduced in size. Bylines were put in capitals (supposedly giving the named writers greater authority). To anyone of visual sensitivity, the result was a great improvement. The paper once again looked more authoritative then its competition.

Unlike his two predecessors who were internal appointments, Jenkins arrived at The Times as its editor. The question thus arose as to how many other outsiders he would bring with him. First of all, he brought in a new managing editor, Peter Roberts. In retrospect, Jenkins believed, ‘Without any shadow of doubt, this was the critical appointment I made.’ Roberts, who had fulfilled the same role at the Sunday Times for the previous twelve years, was by experience and temperament well suited for the job. The position of managing editor was never an easy one since it involved attempting to please the proprietor by finding economies and the editor by providing him with the resources to create the paper he wanted. Roberts was adept at this balancing act, particularly during what would prove in 1990 to be one of the great financial crises to hit the company. ‘He took a huge burden off my shoulders,’ Jenkins believed, and thereby allowed him the time and space to devote his attentions more fully to editing the paper.[8]

One reliable assistant Jenkins was sorry to lose was the deputy editor he inherited from Wilson: John Bryant went off to edit the troubled Sunday Correspondent and, after it folded, the European. Jenkins found himself relying heavily on Michael Hamlyn as night editor and brought in David Lipsey who had been a member of James Callaghan’s Downing Street staff and subsequently editor of New Society. Where Jenkins was particularly active in hiring was in the field of ‘specialist’ writers. He believed that this was an area that had been badly hit in the aftermath of the move to Wapping and needed reinforcing. Those who remained had been the bedrock of The Times’s continued claims to incisiveness – Frances Gibbs who had been legal correspondent since 1982, Richard Ford, a political Correspondent who was moved to home affairs, and Stewart Tendler, who had built up an extensive range of police contacts and informants since becoming crime correspondent in 1978. Jenkins recognized the need to appoint more writers with this level of expertise. To write on science, he hired Nigel Hawkes from the Observer. From the BBC came Philip Bassett to write on industrial matters. In October 1990 came the greatest coup of all, when Anatole Kaletsky was hired from the FT to write about economics. The most significant fusion of new blood came to the arts pages, however. Marcus Binney was appointed architectural correspondent with a remit to write – initially on Saturdays – about the built heritage, a subject close to Jenkins’s heart (Binney was the founder of Save Britain’s Heritage) and to many of the paper’s readers too. Despite Richard Morrison’s relative youth, Jenkins was impressed by his enthusiasm and obvious commitment to improving the coverage. Morrison became arts editor. Within six months, many of the critics were replaced. Benedict Nightingale became chief theatre critic, Richard Cork took over reviewing the visual arts, and later, in 1992, Rodney Milnes was hired as one of the country’s foremost authorities on opera. In a crucial area in which the Independent had been making gains, these experts began to turn the tide in The Times’s favour.

It was not just a question of personnel. Jenkins immediately axed ‘Spectrum’ the daily features page. He sought, instead, to develop specialist sections of the paper. With Wapping’s new presses ready to roll offering added capacity and (sparing) use of colour, advertising-linked supplements for higher education, law, the media, science and technology could be produced. Wilson had increased the amount of material in the paper but – except on Saturdays – had not radically altered the basic structure in which it was presented. With the outsider’s eye, Jenkins’s approach was to redesign the paper afresh and he was lucky that he arrived just as the technology to realize his vision was being installed.

The other broadsheets had brought out colour magazines on Saturdays. Jenkins believed The Times’s failure to follow suit was retarding its growth on the biggest sales day. In June, Saturday Review magazine was added with Andrew Harvey as its editor. Although not a ‘glossy’, it was an attractive colour-printed tabloid that was elegantly designed and featured well-crafted essays. Its upmarket pitch was evident from the first issue’s front cover, a work by Piero della Francesca – ‘a signature as far as I was concerned,’ Jenkins confessed.[9] Within two months, it had helped add twenty thousand new readers at the weekend. A brief foray with a weekend magazine for children, Prime Time, made a hopeful start – almost ten thousand young readers responded to its competitions and offers in its first two weeks alone. Unfortunately, it lasted only twelve issues before falling victim to cost cutting in time for Christmas 1990. Yet, the financial squeeze placed on the company in the midst of the economic recession did not retard the drive for other new supplements. In September 1991, the Saturday offering was again improved when Weekend Times was launched. With fashion moved into Saturday Review and with arts, health and media all getting specialist attention, what remained of general features needed to be reconsidered. Brigid Callaghan came up with a new title Life and Times that focused on people in both the wider and narrow sense – from interviews with the famous or noteworthy to lifestyle features, changes in society and choices in the high street. This new section was duly launched in February 1992.

Under Charles Wilson, The Times had identified itself closely – some felt too closely – with the Thatcherite cause. Jenkins found disquiet among the leader writers and this was brought to a head within a fortnight of his arrival when one of them, David Walker, penned an article in the Listener criticizing the right-wing stance. Walker believed that ‘The Times, with its rhetoric about reforming the very institutions (the law, universities, professions) on which its own idea of authority in culture and society depends, is left incoherent.’[10] It had, effectively, been criticizing the traditional constituencies that Jenkins wanted to wrestle back from the embrace of the Independent. This may have been in line with some of the new editor’s thinking but Walker won no plaudits for washing the paper’s political laundry in public. Jenkins abruptly sacked him for disloyalty. Yet how far he would move towards the Walker worldview and shift the paper’s political opinions back towards the centre ground became one of the first tests of his editorship.

Mrs Thatcher’s mounting unpopularity certainly made the conditions auspicious for a repositioning, but the new editor’s attempts to be seen as master in his own house and not the placeman of Rupert Murdoch also suggested there would be a change in tone. There would, however, be no return to the ‘on the one hand … and on the other hand’ tradition. Jenkins deplored the sort of leaders that ‘open with a paragraph of abstract waffle as the writer clears his throat, and ends with a similar paragraph of vague bromide’. Leaders, he felt, should state their intentions from the first and repeat them at the end. He was, however, against the forth estate getting above itself. ‘Exhortatory constructions tend to read naively,’ he told his fellow leader writers; ‘try not to use ought, should and must, especially when referring to authority or government.’[11] The Op-Ed editor, Mary Ann Sieghart, provided him with her assessment of which journalists could provide the best comment copy. Clifford Longley was head of her (surprisingly short) list.[12] Jenkins also thought highly of the religious affairs correspondent and father of the paper’s NUJ chapel: Longley became one of his college of cardinals formulating leader writer policy. Joining him was another devout Roman Catholic (although facing more towards the political right), Daniel Johnson. The son of the multi-faceted historian Paul Johnson, he was a specialist in German history and culture (he had a First in History from Magdalen College, Oxford, before crossing the Fens to Peterhouse, later co-editing German Neo-Liberals and the Social Market Economy) and had worked at the Centre for Policy Studies before joining the Daily Telegraph in 1986, becoming its Bonn and Eastern Europe correspondents. It was a strong team, but none doubted that Jenkins was an editor who would also want to write his own leading articles.

Jenkins declared that he saw The Times ‘as an independent Conservative paper, which makes up its own mind on policy issues and is open for everyone to put a point of view’.[13] In economic matters Jenkins declared himself an ‘enthusiastic Thatcherite’. In social matters he was less supportive while on education policy he considered himself ‘quite left wing’. Generally, though, he wanted to edit ‘a sceptical Tory paper’.[14] Certainly, there was a pressing piece of legislation ready to receive a sceptical analysis. Laid before Parliament in December 1987, the poll tax bill was due to be implemented in England and Wales on April Fool’s Day 1990 – just two weeks after Jenkins had first sat down in the editor’s chair. The line he took on the tax would be a marker for how slavishly he would follow the Conservative Government even in its most contentious legislation. It also happened to be fundamental to an issue Jenkins cared passionately about – the reinvigoration of the local government of Britain.

III

The centralization of local government provision had deep roots. Poor relief had passed to central government in the 1920s. Government policy directed the council housing boom of the 1950s and 1960s. The denouement came in the early 1980s when the free-spending ways of left-wing councils underlined their defiance of Thatcherite orthodoxy and forced up local rates to punitive levels, driving professionals and capital out of boroughs that were already deprived. The Government reacted by abolishing local government’s setting of supplementary rates in 1982 and introduced rate capping in 1984. The following year, Liverpool City Council had simultaneously demonstrated the irresponsibility of the loony left and the futility of the Government’s rate-capping strategy by failing to set a budget. When there was no more money to pay council employees, taxis were hired to deliver thirty thousand redundancy notices, safe in the knowledge that central government would have to foot the bill. Such antics emboldened Neil Kinnock to confront the Militant Tendency within the Labour Party and made the Government equally determined to reduce local government power further, holding town halls directly accountable for the revenue spending that remained within their remit. This was the path that led to the poll tax.

The Government’s local government strategy was twofold. Firstly, it was to devolve many of its competences to other bodies. Secondly, it was to make it more responsible towards those who paid for what provisions were left in its gift. At the end of March 1986, the Government dismantled the Greater London Council and England’s Metropolitan councils. The Times was certainly not sorry to see London’s executive functions levered out of the grip of Ken Livingstone, but nor was it enthusiastic that the right policy had been pursued, believing that the GLC’s ‘deliberative and oversight capacities’ should have been retained.[15] Yet, while the GLC’s abolition attracted the most attention a far larger revolution was underway. The fate of the inner cities and whether their decline was the fault of central or local government was one of the tests of political opinion in the 1980s. In the 1987 general election Mrs Thatcher had declared it her mission to deal with the problem rather in the way that Gladstone had once put down his tree-cutting hatchet to pronounce that it was his mission to pacify Ireland. Yet, the regeneration – of which London’s Docklands was but the most shining example – was achieved not by re-empowering local democracy but by emasculating it further. Regeneration was entrusted to urban development quangoes (quasi-autonomous government organizations) that cut through layers of town hall bureaucracy and better understood how to attract investment. By the 1990s, unelected local quangoes were responsible for spending more money than elected local government. There was an obvious democratic deficit in this state of affairs.

The deficit that the Government chose to address, however, was that affecting the elected branch of local government. While thirty-six million Britons were eligible to vote in local elections, only eighteen million paid local rates and only twelve million paid the property-graded tax in full. The all too apparent consequence had been reckless spending by Labour-controlled councils which, in The Times’s opinion, suffered no consequences themselves ‘since the majority of their political supporters, paying little or no rates, have no incentive to call them to account’.[16] Rate capping had attempted to prune the worst offenders, but it only encouraged some councils to deliberately set high budgets knowing that any cut could then be blamed on Mrs Thatcher’s bean counters. The answer, or so it seemed to her Environment Secretary, Nicholas Ridley, was a poll tax. When the plans were unveiled in December 1987 the poll tax (to be called ‘a community charge’, although few bothered with the official term) envisaged making almost everyone on the electoral roll pay it. This was far more than the alternative, a local income tax, would have brought into the tax net. For Ridley, this was part of its appeal – it spread responsibility and minimized the poverty trap problem created by high marginal rates for those just within each band. Thus, rather than creating more bands – as even many Tories demanded – the Government preferred a system of rebates for those on low incomes. Even students, pensioners and those of social security would be expected to pay 20 per cent of the poll tax. Whatever effect this would have on reconnecting local government to its community, the more immediate political effect was ably expressed in The Times headline ‘Ridley unveils poll tax bill to Tory fears’.[17]

Under Charles Wilson The Times had sympathized with the poll tax’s intention but had worried about its feasibility. Rates had at least had the advantage of being a tax on property that was easy to collect. By comparison, tracking down defaulters that would include students and other peripatetic lodgers would prove a bureaucratic nightmare. The paper had accurately predicted that some might try and dodge payment by removing themselves from the electoral roll, thereby creating a disenfranchized underclass.[18] Yet the true position of The Times was one of equivocation. The new system would be ‘at least no more unfair than the old rating system’ was hardly a ringing endorsement but nor was it a thundering denunciation.[19] A test run was provided in Scotland, where the poll tax was introduced a year before England. The result was a massive display of discontent and even disobedience. Partly, this was a reflection of the belief among Scots that they were being used as guinea pigs although the truth was rather that they were the tail wagging the dog. It had been Scotland’s imminent rates revaluation (which statutorily had to take place every five years there) that had panicked ministers into bringing forward the poll tax proposals. Given the soaring property prices throughout the United Kingdom, it had been assumed in 1987 that a revaluation in England and Wales would have massively increased the amounts property owners had to pay under the old rating system.

In fact, the poll tax was introduced on faulty premises and bad forecasting. It particularly hit Mrs Thatcher’s natural constituency – the lower middle class who would pay the same as the wealthy without the rebates offered to those on low income or benefit. It was introduced at a time when the recession was commencing and the middle class belief that the increasing price of property gave them security was just starting to come unstuck. Furthermore, the Government had underestimated how much the effect of higher spending councils would push up the poll tax, ensuring that introduction of charge capping that undermined the local accountability argument that had recommended the new tax in the first place. Higher local taxes were blamed on the Government, not the councils whose alleged profligacy they supposedly reflected. The tax had, in any case, only further weakened the link between the sums town halls raised and spent. Eighty per cent of local government spending was now provided by central government using a uniform distribution formula.

On 31 March, the day before the tax was due to be introduced in England and Wales, a large demonstration organized by the All-Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation ended in a riot in Trafalgar Square. There were more than three hundred arrests. Nearly four hundred policemen were injured amid fights and fires in the heart of London. The violence was condemned by all responsible groups, but the sense that the poll tax was contributing to a fragmentation of society was widespread. Following on from Brixton, Toxteth, the miners’ strike and Wapping, the protest-turned-riot had become one of the abiding images of Thatcher’s Britain alongside HMS Invincible returning from the South Atlantic, yuppie businessmen in red braces and estate agents’ ‘For Sale’ signs. It provided the occasion for The Times to come firmly off the fence and condemn the poll tax without equivocation:

So long as the tax remains in place, expediency will require the Treasury, and therefore national taxpayers to bear an ever greater share of local spending, as ministers hurl money at a lengthening line of losers. Since, in the early years of this Government, more local spending was rightly being pushed on to local rates, this reverse move is a real loss to local accountability, and makes a mockery of the prime motive for the charge … a brave, but possibly wise, Government might now admit that it had made a mistake and reintroduce rates as from 1991.[20]

Running concomitantly with the poll tax fiasco was the slide in support for the Conservative Party. Nine days before the Trafalgar Square riot, Labour had overturned a 14,700 Tory majority in a by-election in Mid-Staffordshire. The Prime Minister no longer looked impregnable. She was buffeted not only by the poll tax anger and the worsening economic climate but also by discontent among some of her most senior colleagues over her growing Euro-scepticism. The obvious challenger remained in the shape of Michael Heseltine who had languished with ill-concealed impatience on the backbenches since the Westland crisis, the continuing focus for Tory Jacobite hopes and plots. Two days after Jenkins had become editor, The Times had run a leading article advising Heseltine to ‘put up or shut up’.[21] Yet, at that stage, the considered opinion was that Mrs Thatcher would survive a direct challenge. In April, the acclaimed biographer and Conservative Party historian Lord Blake wrote on the Op-Ed page an examination of the historical record of Thatcher’s predecessors and concluded it was highly unlikely that a Conservative leader would be deposed while still in office. ‘It will be surprising if any serious potential successor puts his name down as an opponent of Mrs Thatcher in a party election in the autumn,’ he prophesied, before adding, ‘an attempt to overthrow her would do the party far more harm than any which she can do by remaining … When Disraeli overthrew Peel, he doomed his party to 28 years of impotence’.[22]

In the months that followed, however, the Prime Minister appeared increasingly isolated. She had already lost Alan Walters, the last senior figure able to put up intelligent arguments against the Treasury’s zeal to lock sterling into the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary System. In July, Nicholas Ridley, one of the few Cabinet ministers who had been genuinely enthusiastic about the poll tax, resigned after the Spectator published anti-German comments he had made to the magazine’s editor, Dominic Lawson, in connection with ceding power to a European central bank. In October, the cause of monetary union was boosted and the diminishing power of the Prime Minister over her Cabinet colleagues laid bare when John Major, the Chancellor, locked sterling into the ERM. Britain, once again, had incarcerated its currency into a house of correction that restricted its ability to float freely. Whenever it looked like sliding below its allotted fixed band (which was set at a 6 per cent margin around one pound equalling 2.95 Deutschmarks) the Treasury was committed to intervening to keep its value up. Major was determined to use a high exchange rate as his tool to fight inflation which, approaching 11 per cent, was back where it had been when Mrs Thatcher had first taken office in 1979. The announcement of ERM membership was accompanied by an entirely political (and consequently ephemeral) interest rate cut to 14 per cent.

The Times did not condemn Major’s decision outright, but its tone was decidedly sniffy. Certainly there were arguments for joining the ERM: it would smooth out the currency volatility that affected the half of Britain’s manufactured goods exported to the other ERM member states across the English Channel and would act as an anti-inflationary ‘discipline’. But the leading column doubted the wisdom of this ‘one-club’ approach to economic management. ‘The German Bundesbank has, in effect, been asked to take the lead role in British monetary policy’ the paper noted with the same analysis – but not the xenophobic rhetoric – that had ended Ridley’s Cabinet career.[23] It would shortly become apparent that in wrestling with the huge costs of reunification, the German Bundesbank had more pressing concerns than caring about what was good for British interests. In the meantime, Britain could brace itself for worse unemployment. By 15 November, the jobless total had gone back up to 1.7 million and showed no signs of levelling off.

Whether joining the ERM would defeat inflation remained to be seen. The policy had the enthusiastic endorsement of the Bank of England, the CBI, the TUC, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and the Financial Times. Some of these supporters appeared to be motivated not just by economic analysis but also by the recognition that joining represented a move towards Britain’s engagement with the European Community and no less excitingly a slap in the face to Margaret Thatcher. Major had ridden roughshod over the Prime Minister’s proviso that ERM membership could not take place until there was inflation rate convergence in his desperate search for a quick fix solution to Britain’s mounting problems. Britain’s inflation rate was double the European average. These shortcomings became obvious to critics as the months passed, but The Times’s initial assessment that the manner in which Britain was taken into the ERM demonstrated that ‘politics has triumphed over economics’ and that the timing ‘could hardly be less propitious for much of British industry’ stood against the grain of received opinion at the time.[24] The Financial Times’s analysis that ‘both politically and economically, entry is shrewdly timed’ did not say much for its judgment in either matter. Its stable mate, The Economist, fell into the same category. But it was not alone as opinion writers across the broadsheet spectrum endorsed the move. The relief was expressed with even greater adulation in the mid-market press. The Daily Mail was beside itself with joy. Murdoch’s Today was delighted by the ‘historic’ move.[25]

On Fleet Street the most prescient writer proved to be Anatole Kaletsky. While the City traders trundled into work on Monday 8 October for the first day of ERM membership, Kaletsky forecast not the ‘golden scenario’ almost universally being attributed to the move but, rather, a testing time ahead. ‘Like every country that chooses to pamper its consumers with an overvalued exchange rate (a policy that Germany and Japan have always tried to eschew) Britain will eventually have to pay a hefty price for deindustrialisation,’ he warned. The notion that ERM membership would bring lower interest rates was wishful thinking: ‘If international investors begin to catch a whiff of devaluation, either before or soon after a general election, then the supposed support for sterling provided by the ERM rules could turn into a political burden … Sterling may jump to the top of its target band this morning, as virtually everyone seems to be expecting. But how long it stays there is another matter.’[26]

Acronym-adept pro-Europeans hoped that Britain’s entry into the ERM meant the economy was finally being attuned to the prospect of EMU. When the prospect was pushed onto the agenda at a summit of European leaders in Rome at the end of October, Mrs Thatcher made it clear that monetary union would come, in effect, over her dead body. For those tired of her hectoring style, this was not so much a threat as an incitement. It was Sir Geoffrey Howe who decided to wield the knife. His resignation from the Cabinet plunged the Government back into crisis.

Treated dismissively by a Prime Minister who had shunted him from the Foreign Office to the ill-defined post of Deputy Prime Minister, Howe’s resignation looked all too predictable in hindsight. Yet this made it no less destructive. He had been the last remaining member of Mrs Thatcher’s first Cabinet in 1979. All others had passed by the wayside. Indeed, as The Times pointed out, his long-standing commitment to monetarism made him, in some respects, a Thatcherite before Thatcher. However, if he was attempting to instigate a successful challenge to her leadership, the paper believed he would fail. ‘The next generation of Tory leaders are certainly in waiting, but they are waiting within the cabinet, not outside it.’ The cause of European union was, it reasoned, a poor one to choose. ‘Undoubtedly the Europe issue is dividing the party,’ the leading column conceded, ‘but it is not another tariff reform, nor another appeasement. The debate is over degrees of sovereignty, subsidiarity, even just the mood music of European cooperation.’[27] This was a misjudgment. Like tariff reform and appeasement in the past, it would indeed become the most divisive issue in Tory politics during the 1990s. The Times’s failure to perceive the extent of the ideological disagreement led it to discount the danger in which the Prime Minister was about to find herself. This complacency was shattered a fortnight later when Howe delivered his resignation speech in the House of Commons. The front page headline, ‘Howe attack leaves MPs gasping’, summed up the atmosphere in the chamber and, in a reference to the old claim that an attack by Sir Geoffrey was like being savaged by a dead sheep, Mel Calman provided a pocket cartoon of a fat sheep with the remains of the Iron Lady’s legs dangling from its jaws with the simple caption, ‘Howe’s that?’[28] Within hours, Michael Heseltine announced he would challenge for the leadership.

The next morning, The Times carried an interview by Robin Oakely in which the challenger laid out his stall. He was, he boasted, far more of an electoral asset than the existing Prime Minister. Furthermore, he would reform (and presumably abolish) the poll tax and engage positively on Europe (code for sign up to the single currency) so that the City of London did not lose out from EMU. The following day a Times/MORI opinion poll appeared to support the first of his claims. It suggested that with Heseltine in Downing Street the Tories would gain a ten-point lead over Labour in the polls. For Tory MPs, anxious at how the poll tax was making their seats dangerously marginal, Heseltine appeared to offer a lifeline.

Ever since Simon Jenkins had assumed the editorship, his paper had been advising Heseltine to get on with his clear desire to stand against the Prime Minister and settle the matter once and for all. On 12 November, the day before Howe’s speech, the leading column had teased the potential challenger further by ending, ‘If Mr Heseltine fails to throw his cap into the ring, he will thoroughly deserve to have it stuffed down his throat.’[29] Having helped to goad him into a position where Howe’s resignation would have made his silence look like cowardice,[30] The Times prepared to let him down with an almighty thud. Three days before the first ballot of the 372 Tory MPs, the paper ran an anonymous profile of Heseltine in which he was portrayed as ambitious to a degree unusual even among driven politicians. It suggested that he would have no more of a collective approach to Cabinet government than had Mrs Thatcher. The picture painted was certainly not personally attractive and read, in parts, like a professional hatchet job.[31] Instead, The Times rallied to the Prime Minister’s tattered standard. The leading article, entitled ‘The Case for Thatcher’, was written by Simon Jenkins. She was in the fourth year of her third administration and, ‘unlike those previously accused of splitting the party, such as Peel or Joseph Chamberlain, she has not radically departed from her last election mandate’. Ousting her, the editorial said, ‘would rank even higher in the catalogue of political ingratitude than Churchill’s 1945 election defeat, for Churchill was rejected by his opponents, not his erstwhile supporters’. It concluded that so long as Mrs Thatcher made it clear she would henceforth rule through a triumvirate with John Major and Douglas Hurd, ‘she can still win the Tories an election. She does not deserve decapitation tonight.’[32]

Did The Times’s appeal for loyalty to the leader rally any wavers? Certainly, it did not persuade enough of them. Far less persuasive was the manner of the Prime Minister’s election campaign. She spent the last three days of it in Paris for the OSCE summit that effectively ended the Cold War. Although she emerged from the ballot with 204 votes to Heseltine’s 152, under the rules the margin was four short of an outright victory. There would have to be a second ballot. From the steps of the British Embassy in Paris, she strode into the glare of the arc lamps to announce she would fight on. But in Westminster, colleagues were already plotting her downfall and Robin Oakley’s report described her future as ‘in grave doubt’.[33]

The Times’s first inclination was to hope that Heseltine would ‘honourably stand down’. Since he would not, Mrs Thatcher should face the second ballot. After all, with Douglas Hurd and John Major having intimated that they would not stand against her, she would have a straight fight against Heseltine and had already beaten him once.[34] As the hours passed, so the news from the lobby forced Jenkins and his leader writers to reconsider their advice. The so-called ‘men in grey suits’ were ganging up on La Dame de Fer. News arrived that two-thirds of the Cabinet had allegedly told her it was time to go and panic was spreading that Heseltine might actually win the second ballot. To see this prospect off, The Times came up with a new proposal: Mrs Thatcher should stand again but should also release Hurd and Major from their loyalty pledges so that they too could stand. ‘The entry of other candidates,’ the paper reasoned, ‘would almost certainly prevent Mr Heseltine from getting the necessary 187 votes for outright victory.’[35] This was doubtless true, although the result risked demonstrating that the party of government was evenly divided over four different options, none of them commanding a quorum of loyalty on their own. The more obvious option was the one Mrs Thatcher reluctantly felt compelled to adopt. She would fall on her sword so that her revolution might live, at least in some form, under a successor who was not Michael Heseltine.

‘Bravura end of Thatcher era’ ran the headline on Friday 23 November. Having announced her intention to resign, she had proceeded to give a commanding performance on the floor of the Commons. From his sketchwriter’s vantage point above the Speaker’s Chair, Matthew Parris watched the scene. Observing Kinnock’s stint at the dispatch box made him question whether the right party was holding its leadership election – ‘he gulped and blathered, staggering blindly around a verbal grocery shop, knocking tins off shelves’. Mrs Thatcher, by comparison, delivered ‘one of her finest parliamentary performances’. Had it not been too late, Parris wondered if ‘the mess of pin-striped tumbleweed blowing in the wind behind her might have blown her way after all … “Why did they sack you?” Labour’s Dave Nellist shouted. I looked across at the Tory benches. Not a few of them were wondering the same thing.’[36]

The truth was that the Tory benches were caught between anxiety for what they had done and excitement that the circus had a further performance to run. With Mrs Thatcher’s decision to exit, Hurd and Major lost no time in entering the ring. Jenkins went to visit Major, whom he found suffering from toothache. ‘Why not wait another term, you’re still young?’ Jenkins suggested. It was not well received. Major shot back, ‘Well, aren’t you a bit young to be editor of The Times?’ Major was right to be confident for he held the best cards. The Brixton born son of a one-time trapeze artist and garden gnome specialist, his credentials fitted perfectly the Thatcherite creed of opportunity and social mobility. He played on this, declaring his wish to create a ‘classless society’. At a time when the economy was in difficulties and business and home owners were facing mounting debts they could no longer meet, Major conveyed the demeanour of an approachable bank manager, ever ready to look again at ways to lighten the burden. Given the divisive toxins coursing through the Tory body politik, Major’s ability to appear a picture of sweet reasonableness was his great asset. ‘I believe in a very broad church Conservatism,’ he told Robin Oakley in his pre-second ballot interview in The Times. Discerning which hymn sheet Major sang from would preoccupy the paper’s finest political minds for years to come. With momentary self-delusion, Thatcher telephoned Jenkins before the second ballot to assure him that Major was ‘pure gold, pure gold!’.[37]

In contrast, Hurd resembled the perfect Tory patrician: the son of an MP and sometime agricultural correspondent of The Times, educated at Eton and Cambridge (President of the Union), former diplomat, a writer of thrillers in his spare time, a capable and unflappable Home and Foreign Secretary. In the face of Major’s classless appeal, Hurd’s attempts to play down his background – he went to Eton on a scholarship – were treated with derision. Tories who wanted to bring home the Thatcher revolution felt that Major at least looked like the real thing. Mrs Thatcher anointed Major as her successor of choice and, on the morning of the vote, so did The Times – the only broadsheet newspaper to do so. Its reasoning was different, airing instead its suspicion that ‘by inclination and intellect he sits on the left’, but believed his relative youth and demeanour marked him out as the candidate to trump Kinnock’s pretensions towards shaping the agenda for the 1990s.[38] Murdoch did not interfere with the editorial position of his broadsheets. In the course of a telephone conversation with Jenkins, he asked, almost in passing, which candidate The Times had decided to support. Jenkins was given the impression Murdoch scarcely even knew who Major was at that stage.[39] The ‘Murdoch press’ went their separate ways. The Sunday Times backed Heseltine as did Today, edited by David Montgomery. Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph announced its support for Hurd. The Times, at any rate, backed the winner. At forty-seven, John Major became the youngest Prime Minister since Lord Rosebery in 1894.

Matthew Parris produced a sketch that painted the month-long internal convulsion as a ‘tribal folk mystery’. The tribe had been gripped by panic, ‘Michael Heseltine – as much, by now, a totem of dissent as a person – found members of the tribe dancing around him and chanting. He responded.’ The tribe’s leader, meanwhile had started ranting, then ‘one of the elders of the tribe, Sir Geoffrey Howe, began to speak. He spoke almost in tongues: he spoke as he had never spoken.’ What followed, Parris suggested,

could have been done as a ballet. It had all the elements of a classical drama. Like Chinese opera or Greek tragedy, the rules required that certain human types be represented; certain ambitions be portrayed; certain actions punished. Every convention was obeyed; every actor played out his role. The dramatic unities of time, place and action were fulfilled … It started with an old leader, who was assassinated as she deserved; then her assassin was assassinated. As he deserved. Then the new leader stepped forward; and here the ballet ended.[40]

IV

On 2 August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. The tiny oil-rich emirate was, per capita, one of the richest countries in the world. Iraq, meanwhile, was burdened with a $70 billion foreign debt, more than half of which was owed to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Invading Kuwait had the political objectives of settling a historic argument over a couple of small islands, widening Iraq’s narrow front on to the Gulf and demonstrating President Saddam Hussein’s pretensions to regional supremacy. It had the economic objectives of wiping away the debts owed to Kuwait and seizing her oilfields. In the days preceding the invasion, The Times had reported the breakdown of diplomatic relations and the swelling Iraqi military presence on the Kuwait border. But neither the media nor any intelligence service could work out whether the armed build up was there to coerce the emirate or as a precursor to invading it. The Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, learned that Kuwait was being invaded from the radio news, not British or US intelligence.[41] It was a fait accompli. With only the puny Kuwaiti defence forces in the way, the annexation was completed in a matter of hours. Thirty-five British military personnel attached to the emirate were taken prisoner and removed to Baghdad. The Emir’s brother was killed. However, the Emir (whose al-Sabah family had been the local rulers since 1759) managed to escape and the Central Bank in Kuwait had time to transfer the national assets to Bahrain. Oil prices soared 15 per cent. The prospect of higher energy costs at a time when Western economies were slowing down was an alarming one.

With more than one million men under arms, Iraq had the seventh largest army in the world, its armaments swelled in particular by arms deals from France, the Soviet Union and China. After eight years of bloody conflict that may have claimed one million lives, its war with Iran had ended in 1988 with no great gain to either side. Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and had used them. In March 1988 he had bombed the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja with nerve gases, killing thousands. The Times’s Richard Beeston had been one of the first journalists into the ghost town where once fifty thousand had lived only to find it carpeted with dead bodies: ‘Like figures unearthed in Pompeii, the victims of Halabja were killed so quickly that their corpses remained in suspended animation’, he had written at the time. ‘There was the plump baby whose face, frozen in a scream, stuck out from under the protective arm of a man, away from the open door of a house that he never reached.’[42] Thus Saddam was a leader with genocidal tendencies who had every reason to imagine the annexation of Kuwait would pass with only modest protest. Shortly after he had exterminated the Kurds of Halabja, Britain doubled the size of its export guarantee to Iraq and the Americans had provided weapons at a crucial moment when his war with Iran appeared to be going badly.

Saddam, however, had miscalculated. The international community had shrunk from intervening in the fate of Iraqi Kurds or in Iraq’s conflict with the Islamic theocracy of Iran, but the attack on Kuwait was an invasion of a sovereign country. This was as stark a contravention of the UN Charter as could be imagined. What was more, the thawing of the Cold War meant that the Security Council was no longer tied into inactivity by the obstruction of the rival superpowers. There was a historic opportunity to show that collective security could act. Given the scale of Iraq’s precarious finances and its reliance on exporting oil, it was hoped that economic sanctions – so often ineffective in the past – could at last be shown to work, especially given the possibility of their universal application. On 6 August, the UN voted to impose mandatory sanctions against Iraq that included a worldwide ban on its oil exports and on any arms sales or fresh investment into the country. It was only the second time in the UN’s history that economic sanctions on this scale had been imposed. Inauspiciously, the first time had been against Rhodesia in 1967.

Economic sanctions were a means of avoiding taking greater risks. On the day the news of the invasion broke, The Times stated that one of Mrs Thatcher’s senior aides had indicated Britain would not take military action. Sir Anthony Parsons, who had been Ambassador to Iraq, wrote an Op-Ed article expressing his hopes for economic sanctions since ‘it is difficult to imagine military action being taken, whether by the Arab states, one or more of the great powers, or the United Nations. The world of 1990 is far removed from the world of 1945, in which the victorious allies could overawe potential aggressors.’ This turned out to be a complete misreading of the situation although the editorial line of The Times concurred with Parsons’s assessment, suggesting, ‘a mostly American counter-invasion to force Iraq to withdraw, as requested by the exiled Emir, is not an option’. Given the size of the Iraqi army and Saddam’s threat to turn Kuwait into a ‘graveyard’ if there was any attempt to liberate it, ‘the operation would have to be on a scale not seen since Vietnam’. The very mention of that dreaded word appeared to rule out declaring war. Instead, economic sanctions should be allowed to take hold, since ‘Iraq’s political and social weaknesses offer a reasonable hope that Saddam Hussein will not last for ever’.[43] With this assessment, The Times proved to be wrong on both counts: a war to liberate Kuwait could be fought and won at minimal human cost to the liberators and economic sanctions, as practised then and for many years later, would have no effect in bringing Saddam down.

What frightened the West was that, far from stopping at Kuwait City, the Iraqi forces might press on into Saudi Arabia. If Saddam Hussein achieved this, he would gain control of more than 60 sixty per cent of the world’s oil reserves. The extent to which he could hold the developed world hostage hardly needed underlining and for those seeking a resolute response it was fortuitous that President George Bush was meeting Margaret Thatcher (still Prime Minister) in Aspen at the very moment when the Iraqi tanks massed on the Saudi border. On 7 August, the United States began deploying forces to shore up the defence of Saudi Arabia and enforce the embargo through an effective blockade. Yet this was not the same as preparing to liberate Kuwait and as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, maintained in an article The Times had published the previous day, ‘there is little stomach for an American lead in the pursuit of genuine military action’.[44] A far more expansive outlook was proposed on the same page, the following day, by the noted Middle Eastern commentator Amir Taheri. He maintained that Saddam Hussein was in a far weaker position than the size of his army suggested. Indeed, an opportunity now existed to foster democracy in the Gulf. ‘Kicking Saddam out of Kuwait with his tail between his legs should be just the first step towards creating a new and stable system in the region,’ Taheri wrote, for while ‘a decade or so ago, there was, perhaps, no credible base for democracy in the Arab states of the Gulf, today, however, all have strong middle classes, many of them western educated and familiar with modern forms of government. Given a chance they could learn the democratic game.’[45] Taheri’s arguments fell upon deaf ears in 1990. Yet, thirteen years later, they would make perfect sense to those in the White House and Downing Street as they plotted what they hoped would be a successful endgame to the protracted problem of Saddam Hussein.

The House of Saud’s decision to allow US troops on Saudi soil was crucial in changing minds about the possibility and desirability of removing Saddam from Kuwait by force. It was a fateful decision in many ways. Permitting Christian soldiers in the land of Islam’s most sacred sites helped to drive Osama bin Laden down the path of hatred that was, in time, to lead to 9/11, the ‘War against Terror’ and the American decision to occupy Iraq. Such consequences were ill perceived in the summer of 1990. What began as an immediate shoring up of Saudi defences soon expanded into preparations for the military liberation of Kuwait. The appetite of the UN and of other Arab nations (with the notable exception of Jordan) for liberating the emirate state made this transformation possible. Saddam’s eccentric diplomacy – on the one hand appealing to Arab solidarity by trying to link a settlement to Palestinian claims while calling for a Holy War to overthrow the Egyptian and Saudi governments and even offering concessions to Iran – did not enhance his regional reputation. There were 1400 British nationals in Iraq. When Saddam had them rounded up so that they could be used as human shields against attack he only hardened British public opinion against him. His decision to be filmed in a display of faux affection stroking the hair of one of his captives, a five year old boy named Stuart Lockwood, only gave the impression that he was some sort of twisted pervert.

A month after the invasion, Mrs Thatcher announced Britain would send ground troops to the Gulf. In November, Bush massively increased the US ground forces dispatched to the area. On 29 November, UN Resolution 678 was passed by twelve votes to two (China abstained, only Cuba and Yemen voted against) authorizing a military solution to drive Iraq out of Kuwait unless she withdrew voluntarily by 15 January 1991. With Rosemary Righter influencing the leader-writing stance, The Times had swung round in favour of UN-backed armed intervention. This, after all, was a rare opportunity for the UN’s principles for international order to be tested. By the time war broke out, twenty-eight Arab, Asian and Western nations had joined the coalition supporting the implementation of the UN’s resolutions to free Kuwait. Although The Times’s first reflex had been to back economic sanctions, Righter saw that ‘giving sanctions time to work’ was the mantra used by those determined to avoid war at any cost. As far as she was concerned, the record of such sanctions did not justify the faith the peace campaigners placed upon then, especially given Saddam’s indifference to human suffering. ‘Not since 1939 has an aggression left so clear a choice to those seeking a just international order’ asserted the leading article justifying war: ‘The coalition ranged against Iraq represents a step towards the collective enforcement of international law. This experiment must be made to work in the Gulf or countries must arm and ally themselves as best they can against the law of the jungle.’[46]

Britain went to war in the Gulf, unlike in the Falklands, with the united endorsement of the national press. The tabloids vied with each other to take the most jingoistic line (the Daily Mirror, which had disliked fighting General Galtieri, was now under the ownership of the pro-Israeli Robert Maxwell). Preferring the economic sanctions route, the Guardian was the most reluctant convert to a military solution, yet, whatever their varying levels of enthusiasm, that no national newspaper opposed going to war outright proved to be a moment of remarkable political unanimity in Fleet Street and a far cry from both the Suez and Falklands experiences. For those not given to marching in step with the Tories, endorsing the Government’s line was made easier when the less abrasive John Major supplanted Margaret Thatcher only eight weeks before the bombing raids began.

Given Saddam’s ruthless record and his threat to launch missiles against Israeli cities, Fleet Street drew up its own dispositions for a long campaign that would stretch resources to the full. With Graham Paterson in command of the newspaper’s war coverage, The Times finalized its own arrangements eight days before the UN deadline was due to expire. Decisions had to be taken on how many pages could be added and what deadlines could be stretched. The graphics team was put on twenty-four-hour call, ready to illustrate maps with swooping Apache helicopters and guided missiles bursting out of the page. A large body of pre-written analysis was commissioned that examined the military and diplomatic background to the outbreak of hostilities. Rosemary Righter would compose most of the leaders. The defence correspondent, Michael Evans, would spend much of the next couple of months at MoD briefings. Peter Stothard and Martin Fletcher would file from Washington. Among the twelve Times reporters filing from the Middle East would be Michael Knipe in Cairo, Christopher Walker in Saudi Arabia and Richard Owen in Jerusalem. Jamie Dettmer would report on the Royal Navy’s war from on board HMS London and Philip Jacobson, embedded with the 7th Armoured Brigade in Saudi Arabia, would advance with the Army. The details of the company’s life insurance policy were examined.[47] Most important of all, Richard Beeston would tough it out behind enemy lines, as The Times’s correspondent in Baghdad.

Much of the official military information was disseminated from the daily briefings held at the coalition headquarters in Riyadh – hundreds of miles from the battlefront. With the experience of the Falklands conflict to draw upon, the MoD drew up a seven-page document providing guidance on what information could be released. It listed thirty-two examples of what journalists should not report without first clearing their copy with the Ministry. The guiding principle, of course, was that no information should be published that could assist the enemy. Detailing size, capability and location of allied units was clearly off limits. The same applied to publishing casualty figures before the Ministry decided it was safe to do so. Reports that included information about ongoing operations and damage to naval vessels or military aircraft were also prohibited without prior clearance if the details had not already been announced officially. Looking at the rules, Christopher Walker expressed the opinion of many reporters who feared ‘one of the most sanitised wars this century in terms of immediate reportage’.[48] In return for being ’embedded’ with the soldiers and sailors, Jacobson and Dettmer had to remain with their military escort officers at all times. Where need be, copy had ‘this report is subject to allied reporting restrictions’ tagged to the end of it.

However, in vital respects, the Gulf situation was very different from the Falklands War. Then, the British Government had been able to restrict the coverage of the Task Force’s mission to British journalists working for British newspapers and broadcasters. Censoring their work was thus relatively easy within a national framework of agreed rules and understandings and the absence of satellite coverage meant that no instant broadcasts could be sent from the battlefront. No such limitations applied in the Gulf where the world’s media descended and where CNN, the world’s first twenty-four-hour satellite news broadcaster, was able to transmit words and pictures instantly all over the globe. The ‘national interest’ was not obviously something that a multinational broadcaster would feel bound to honour. The nature of the British media’s contribution was also different. In the Falklands War most of the journalists following the Task Force were employed by newspapers. This was not the case at the outbreak of the Gulf War. In the last days before Operation Desert Storm commenced, ITN had a forty-six-strong team in Saudi Arabia and Baghdad, the BBC had around thirty and there were thirty-five from national newspapers, along with a handful from the regional press and news agencies.[49]

The Times also had its armchair generals in position. The long build-up of coalition forces in Saudi Arabia had given the Iraqis plenty of time to dig in. Yet, Michael Evans predicted that, unlike the Iran – Iraq conflict, Desert Storm would be a war of rapid movement. The five hundred French-and Soviet-made fighter planes of the Iraqi air force would be ‘unlikely to survive the first hours of conflict’ given the likelihood that they would be the first target of American bombing. Consequently, the Iraqis would have to deal with American air superiority and technological firepower the like of which they had never faced in the long struggle with Iran. American, British and French night-vision equipment would give them a huge advantage in striking during the night. There was, however, the potential for a massive tank battle, with Iraq’s 4200 tanks deployed in and around Kuwait against the coalition’s three thousand strong force. Evans seemed certain that the coalition would prevail while Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Armitage went further, writing a column that suggested it could prove to be ‘a very short campaign.’[50] These views were far removed from the opinion of peace campaigners and Sir Edward Heath, whose prophecies were apocalyptic.

Shortly before midnight (9.50 p.m. GMT) on 16 January, Operation Desert Storm began, as expected, with intensive aerial bombing. Two days later Iraq launched the first of several Scud missile attacks on Israel cities, including Tel Aviv, in the dead of night. America’s deployment of Patriot anti-missile defences – and the inflated claims made for their effectiveness – was intended to quell Israeli demands for revenge. Yet, the fear that the Scuds would inflict great damage – physically and politically – was never far from the minds of those following the conflict. In fact the damage inflicted by the Scuds was minor compared with the ordinance raining down upon the Iraqis. The first couple of weeks of Operation Desert Storm consisted of an unremitting aerial bombardment in which wave upon wave of flight sorties and missiles severed Saddam’s communications system. Within two days of the assault commencing, Beeston reported, ‘The capital’s communications centre is destroyed, hit by four precision missiles. The Presidential Palace lies half in ruins’ in a city largely ‘deserted and those who have not fled are making plans to do so.’[51] Ineffectual anti-aircraft flak drifted up into the Baghdad night sky and images were beamed back from the nose of US missiles as they homed in with deadly precision upon their target. These were pictures made for television, a moving image world in which the print media could not compete except with the sort of graphics that some readers felt turned the conflict into a comic strip. Those who had expected Baghdad would be carpet bombed like a second Dresden were relieved that technological advances in missile technology had created greater discrimination. But even the smartest bombs could not avoid civilians who found themselves in the way and the ugly phrase ‘collateral damage’ began to take a gruesome hold over reporting the death of innocent bystanders. Beeston also made clear that some targets were being missed and that anti-Western sentiment from civilians he encountered on the streets was hardening.[52]

An Arab speaker, Beeston was more than equal to the challenge. The son of one of the Daily Telegraph’s most highly regarded foreign correspondents, he had avoided university, preferring to go straight into journalism. At the tender age of twenty-one he answering an advertisement to become a reporter in Beirut. There could have been few better training grounds. In this context, his dispatch to Baghdad did not seem to him to involve unnecessary risks. ‘It wasn’t frightening at all,’ he recalled, ‘it was exhilarating.’[53] Two days before Operation Desert Storm commenced, Washington had contacted all the media networks and told them to get their journalists out of Baghdad immediately – US forces would be using bunker-busting bombs and their safety could not be guaranteed. Suddenly, Beeston found himself deserted by so many of the reporters who had congregated with him, holed up in Baghdad’s Al-Rashid Hotel. Among the British broadsheets, only the representatives of the Independent and the Sunday Times opted, like Beeston, to stick it out.

Excessive censorship from the Iraqi regime would have devalued the worth of Beeston’s commitment to The Times. However, Baghdad’s officials were in a state of confusion and disorder and proved incompetent censors. He found himself with considerable freedom of movement and the official minder appointed to shadow him and censor his reports let through references to how quickly the Iraqi defence effort appeared to be disintegrating. Only when he attempted to state that there was no water and the hotel was beginning to get a bit smelly did the minder cut in with the gentle admonishment, ‘Mr Richard, please take out the “smelly”. It is insulting to us.’[54] Beeston felt in surprisingly little danger from the vengeance of the brutal Iraqi state although when he filed more detailed reports about the breaking morale and troop desertions, officialdom finally intervened. He was deported and banned from Iraq for three years. The only way a new Times reporter was going to get into the country was with the assistance of the British Army.

The problem was that, aside from a repulsed Iraqi incursion around the Saudi border town of Khafji, there was still no sign of the promised ground war after almost a month of the conflict’s commencement and the ordinance dispatched from 67,000 sorties. Until the frontal assault began, analysts could not prove whether this war of missiles was working or was merely an expensive way to avoid confronting the ultimate necessity of a head-on ground invasion. Neil Kinnock sacked Clare Short, a Labour front-bench spokewomen, for suggested the bombing was about smashing Iraq rather than liberating Kuwait, but the specific event that had provoked her claim also strengthened the sceptics in their belief that all was not going well. On 13 February, two US missiles landed in Baghdad, penetrating ten feet of reinforced concrete and steel bars and exploding inside what had been identified as a military command and control centre directing Iraqi forces but was also a civilian shelter that included a school, a mosque and a supermarket. Graphic scenes were soon broadcast around the world of the charred remains of hundreds of women and children being brought out from the bunker. With Beeston deported, the Sunday Times’s Marie Colvin immediately filed her eyewitness report for The Times, painting the despair of the relatives as they visited the scene of carnage and discovered the rest of their families had been obliterated.[55]

The opinions of Clare Short and those looking for reasons to condemn the war were one matter. Yet, to the alarm of a number of Times journalists cooped up in the rum warehouse, the editor’s resolve appeared to be severely shaken during the afternoon conference in which the attack on the shelter was discussed. Jenkins gave the impression he wanted a quick exit strategy to a war that was having calamitous consequences. His change of heart unnerved his colleagues. Martin Ivens and Rosemary Righter were especially determined to prevent The Times performing a U-turn halfway through a war it had endorsed. The leading article that emerged from the showdown gave little hint of the private confrontation. It expressed the hope that future targeting would better balance political with military imperatives and that the war had reached a stage when the bombing should concentrate on Iraq’s forward positions in the war zone of Kuwait itself.[56] Nonetheless, for many of the senior editorial staff, it was Jenkins’s judgment that was seriously questioned. It was, to paraphrase what Margaret Thatcher had previously told George Bush, no time to go wobbly.

With Jenkins’s doubts overcome, or at least, outgunned by Ivens and Righter, The Times stiffened its resolve for the battle ahead, unmoved by last-minute attempts by Gorbachev to mediate peace before the land war commenced in earnest.[57] The Iraqis began setting the Kuwaiti oil wells alight on 22 February and the sky was soon black with the fumes of five hundred blazing oil installations. Two days later the ground assault into the emirate began. By 27 February, the Iraqis had fled from Kuwait City, a freelance correspondent with the US television network CBS being the first to broadcast the news from the capital that it was back in Kuwaiti hands even before the allied troops had arrived to liberate it officially. The Times’s Christopher Walker was not far behind. He discovered a city convulsed by devastation and jubilation. Hotels, public buildings, even the Emir’s palace, had been gutted. The cheering crowds were reminiscent of Paris’s liberation in 1944 and there was no shortage of Kuwaitis coming forward with their own tales of Iraqi barbarism. Tanks were continuing to sweep into the city ‘like a carnival parade’, Walker spotting one forgotten Iraqi running alongside the convey, ‘frantically signalling that he too wanted to be taken prisoner’. Beyond, ‘the roads were littered with Iraqi soldiers’ boots and helmets, discarded during their desperate flight north. Iraqi bodies lay scattered under blankets. One soldier lay sprawled face up on the road, legs buckled, anguish still written across his face.’[58]

Much of the allied advance struck not through the emirate at all but up into southern Iraq to secure the western flank. The British 1st Armoured Division was among the mechanized forces hurtling at speed across the desert to reach the Euphrates and trap the half million Iraqi troops falling back in disorder. In particular, the allies wanted to prevent the elite Republican Guard from making it back to Baghdad. The military briefings in Riyadh were suggesting the extent to which it was a rout: there had been 79 American deaths in exchange for smashing 29 Iraqi divisions, 30,000 prisoners had been taken and more than 3000 tanks captured or destroyed. With the bridges blown and allied mastery of the skies secured, there seemed every possibility of not just liberating Kuwait but also of destroying Iraq’s ability to be a regional menace altogether. With the allied leader, General Norman Schwarzkopf, warning the Iraqis, ‘the gates are closed: there are no ways out’, a bitter tank battle ensued west of Basra between almost 500 US tanks and the 300 tanks of the Republican Guard. Again the Iraqis were pulverized. The biggest British armoured assault since El Alamein was also underway. Observing the advance of the 32nd Field Regiment for The Times, Philip Jacobson did his best to convey the terrifying nature of the barrage falling upon the Iraqis:

From where I was watching just over a mile away, the flashes were blinding and the earth literally heaved beneath me. As shells passed overhead with a noise like someone tearing heavy canvas, the air pressure changed perceptibly. Then came the double boom of impact and percussion wave, like the slamming of a heavy door.… We could follow the course of the battle on radio links in our signals vehicle: the voice of Brigadier Patrick Cordingley, commander of the Desert Rats, was on the air continuously, pressing this unit to get a move on towards a new objective, cautioning another not to get carried away before securing an enemy gunpit. A flurry of traffic would indicate that a new attack was under way, yet virtually every voice was calm and composed, even when the first of the British casualties was brought in.[59]

President Bush announced the ceasefire on 28 February, six weeks to the minute since the campaign began and a hundred hours after the ground war’s launch. The twin objectives of liberating Kuwait and defeating the Iraqi army had, he said, been met. US airborne troops had come within 150 miles of Baghdad. ‘There was no one between us and Baghdad,’ Schwarzkopf told reporters. ‘If it had been our intention to take Iraq, if it had been our intention to destroy the country, if it had been our intention to overrun the country, we could have done it unopposed.’[60]

The UN resolutions sanctioning Kuwait’s liberation did not provide for occupying Iraq. The war had been a remarkable achievement. Britain had suffered twenty-four casualties in action (nine of them from ‘friendly fire’) while the Iraqi dead and wounded was assumed to exceed 100,000. Before the war began, the Pentagon had warned Bush that there could be ten thousand American casualties. In the event, there was about one coalition soldier death for every one thousand Iraqis killed. The sheer one-sidedness of the ‘turkey shoot’ on the trapped Iraqi forces militated against prolonging the slaughter. The Times supported Bush’s ‘statesmanlike’ decision to call a ceasefire rather than to press on to Baghdad. Writing for Op-Ed, David Owen, the former Foreign Secretary and late leader of the SDP, maintained that if this was not to prove ‘to be the single largest mistake of what has otherwise been a brilliantly conducted operation’ it was ‘our duty to make it impossible for Saddam to continue in power’. Rather than treating with his emissaries for peace terms, his removal and charge with war crimes should be the precondition and sanctions should remain in force.[61]

Instead, it looked, briefly, as if the Iraqis might answer Bush’s plea and overthrow Saddam without the need for further intervention. In defeat, Iraq’s regional and religious divisions opened up. The Kurds in the north and the Shia Muslims in the south rose against Saddam’s Sunni dominated regime, pinning it back to its heartland around Baghdad. Iraqi order appeared to be imploding. Indeed, given the separatist aims of the Kurds, the country risked splitting up altogether. The Shia revolt centred upon Basra but uprisings were being reported across the country. However, after five days of fighting, the Republican Guard gained the upper hand. Despite their presence in the south of the country, the coalition forces stood aside. Initially, The Times found it impossible to get any reporters close enough to witness the bloody suppression at first hand but when reports and television pictures of the Kurdish plight eventually did reach London, fears spread that a form of genocide was underway. In freezing conditions, Kurdish families were fleeing to the hills to escape the Iraqi reprisals. If Saddam did not finish them off, the weather might do so. Turkey and Iran sealed their borders.

By the first days of April, reports were appearing that left Times readers in no doubt about the extent of the Kurdish plight. The demands for a humanitarian response crescendoed. Some asserted that having been called upon to rise up in the first place only to be denied any military support when they did so, the Kurds’ and Marsh Arabs’ suffering was largely Britain and America’s fault. In an article entitled ‘Blood on our hands’, Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote in this vein. He was especially incandescent at the UN’s refusal – having sanctioned the liberation of Kuwait and the removal of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction – to insist upon creating democracy in Iraq and safeguarding its victims. The coalition, it seemed to him, preferred to keep the despicable Saddam in power than remove him and risk a power vacuum that might result in a disintegrating Iraq. Yet, seeing the dangers of being drawn into a long term commitment to occupy Iraq, Bush was reluctant to protect the Kurds, confiding that he ‘did not want one single soldier or airman shoved into a civil war in Iraq that has been going on for ages’.[62] Although The Times saw no option but to provide humanitarian assistance, its leading article saw clearly the dangers of interfering in matters of internal sovereignty. With remarkable prescience, it argued:

The 1990s are certain to be the decade of ethnic distress. The unravelling of communism will lead to thousands of ‘economic’ refugees crossing frontiers, making calls on the charity and possibly the armies of the world. The liberal dream of global ethnic concord is no more. Nationalism, the ‘-ism’ that defies communism, liberalism and capitalism alike, remains rampant … The nations of the West will be inclined to use their strength, like medieval crusaders, to reorganize the world according to their own high principles, and sometimes their lower ones. The world must be sure it knows what it is about.[63]

John Major, however, was not concerned with the theoretical arguments of the future but the need to address the humanitarian plight of the moment. He secured European support for a plan for creating Kurdish ‘safe havens’. This pressured – perhaps shamed – a reluctant Washington into joining in. The deployment in mid-April of 5000 American, 2000 British and 1000 French troops saved an unquantifiable number of lives. In Baghdad, however, Saddam remained. Containing, rather than removing, him became the policy through sanctions and no-fly zones. The UN resolved that his weapons of mass destruction should be destroyed and the process of overseeing the process began. It would not prove to be the end of the affair.

While politicians and commentators talked of a ‘new world order’ of international cooperation of which the UN resolutions and the liberation of Kuwait were but the bright beginning, the Gulf War had also brought alive the notion of a ‘global village’ for the news media. From Baghdad’s Al Rashid Hotel, Beeston had filed his dispatches to Wapping from a telex machine. Transmitting to satellites from the hotel’s roof, CNN had beamed images and reports instantly into homes in ninety-three countries around the world. On 28 January, CNN’s Peter Arnett even managed to have a ninety-minute interview with Saddam in which the Iraqi president threatened to use nuclear, chemical and biological warheads against the allies. Satellite television – in which Murdoch was now investing – and the twenty-four-hour rolling news coverage it facilitated had arrived. No other event did more to demonstrate the extent to which power had passed from print to broadcast media. Indeed, while coverage of the war attracted massive viewing figures in Britain, the daily sale of tabloid newspapers actually fell during the period. For its part, The Times had performed well. Its late editions were going to press at 3 and sometimes 4 a.m. in order to compete with the television coverage. But it was under no illusions that if it wanted to hold onto its market share in the future it would have to perform two conflicting functions: to be fast in reporting breaking news and to provide more detailed analysis than its broadcasting rivals could muster.

V

The evidence that the future lay with satellite television could not have come at a better time for Rupert Murdoch. While the Gulf War unfolded, his media empire imploded. The roots of News Corp.’s difficulties lay with his purchase in the United States of Metromedia and Fox. He could have funded the purchase by issuing new shares in News Corp., but that would have diluted his control of the company. Having seen the way his father had been treated, Murdoch never lost his belief that family control was the only guarantee of keeping direction of the company. An alternative was simply to borrow the money. In order not to exceed the gearing limit permitted of debt compared to shareholder equity, he had approached Michael Milken, the ‘junk bond king’, at the bank Drexel Burnham Lambert. Junk bonds offered a high yield because they involved high risk. In March 1986, Milken secured $1.15 billion in junk preferences. This was described as a preference stock – a form of virtual equity – in order not to breach the banks’ gearing limit. However, Milken inserted a clause stipulating that if the $1.15 billion could not be repaid within three years (i.e. by March 1989) remuneration for lenders would reflect News Corp.’s latest share price. Thus, as the News Corp. share price went up, so the debt repayment soared. For Murdoch, this proved disastrous. Thanks to the move to Wapping, News International’s operating income had gone from £38.4 million in 1985 to £150.2 million in 1987. This had sent News Corp.’s ordinary share price rocketing from around $8.50 in March 1986 to $35 a year later. Thus, the more profitable News Corp. became, the greater in debt it plunged. Unless he wanted to issue more shares and lose control of the company, Murdoch had no obvious way out of this vicious circle. What was more, the classification of the junk preferences as equity prevented him from borrowing from banks to pay them off since he had to stay within his banks’ gearing limits. As one commentator put it, ‘Wapping had turned Milken’s conversion clause into a $3.6 billion nightmare’.[64]

During 1990, the downturn in the Western economies intensified. Banks sought to call in their loans. For News Corp. this was an alarming prospect. The recession hit advertising, seriously depleting revenue. The company’s profits were falling, as was its share price. Sky, Murdoch’s satellite television venture, was losing in excess of £2 million a week. The situation was not even secure in the tabloid newspaper market. Robert Maxwell’s Daily Mirror had gained ground on the Sun, partly because Maxwell had invested in colour printing. This had forced a reluctant Murdoch to buy colour presses for Wapping as part of a re-equipping and extension to the plant that consumed £500 million. The Times was the beneficiary of this investment but in so far as it contributed towards destabilizing the company’s finances it was a risky venture. On top of all this, five years of making acquisitions around the world had brought with them debts whose scheduled repayment dates had arrived. The company had in excess of $7 billion in unsecured bank debt and owed $3 billion to its trade creditors. It had to repay $2.6 billion by October 1990. Not only was it in no position to pay this sum back, it needed an extra injection of $600 million merely to keep trading.

A debt rescheduling package was worked out, but by bringing the various transactions together this was a temporary fix that failed to solve a problem: if one of the banks involved was determined to default from the agreement then the whole deal could fall apart. The overused pack of cards analogy was, in this case, all too apt. This was exactly the situation that almost destroyed News Corp. in the first week of December 1990. After much bargaining, the various creditors reached agreement with one small, but awkward, exception. The Pittsburgh National Bank owned 1 per cent of the debt in question and wanted its money back. With great independence of mind, it refused to play its part in the rollover plan even if it meant destroying News Corp. as a consequence. Murdoch’s empire, to say nothing of his ownership of The Times, was in the hands of a Pittsburgh loan officer who appeared blissfully immune to charm or intimidation down a telephone line. Murdoch assured him that if Pittsburgh National refused to roll over the debt then News Corp. would go out of business. ‘That’s right,’ replied the loan officer. Lest there be any misunderstanding, Murdoch sought qualification: ‘You’re telling us to liquidate our company?’ ‘Yes,’ came the unabashed reply.[65] It was not clear where else the conversation could go, so, Murdoch attempted to speak to someone more senior. But Pittsburgh National’s chairman refused to take his call, referring him back to the loan officer. Only when John Reed, the chairman of Citibank, intervened, calling the Pittsburgh National chairman to assure him that allowing News Corp. to go under risked prompting an international financial crash, did the bank give way to Murdoch’s desperate pleas.

This was a temporary respite. In the weeks ahead, News Corp. again appeared close to insolvency with crises breaking on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve overshadowing the expressions of yuletide felicitations within the Murdoch household. Yet, clinging on proved a sufficient tactic in the short term and by February 1991 the debt override agreement was in place that gave News Corp. three years in which to get its financial house in order. There were other glimmers of hope: the pressure was eased on Sky by its swallowing up of its competitor British Satellite Broadcasting and Murdoch’s film company, Twentieth Century-Fox, produced a highly lucrative hit at the box office, Home Alone (which Geoff Brown, The Times’s critic, not entirely helpfully described as being like fast food because it was ‘made to order, with relish but without finesse’).[66] For most of the paper’s journalists pacing anxiously the length of the Wapping warehouse there was a feeling of helplessness, watching and observing news that, for once, directly affected them. It seemed to be especially hard luck at the very moment when an agreeable arrangement appeared to have been reached – an editor left to do what he liked to take the paper upmarket with a proprietor content to pay the bills. Jenkins was deeply alarmed and concerned and had strenuously to dissuade Clifford Longley from asking Murdoch if he would sell The Times to a consortium he was trying to cobble together. Longley saw Murdoch’s problems as The Times’s opportunity, believing that, freed from News International’s care, it could model a new ownership structure based on that which appeared to be suiting the Independent. In fact, Murdoch’s problems during the winter of 1990–91 were not of so minor a scale that floating off The Times would have solved the daunting arithmetic. The only chance of the paper having a new owner was if News Corp. went under. In that scenario it, like all the other parts of the once mighty media group, would be stripped down and sold in the conditions of a fire sale.

Indeed, but for News Corp.’s financial troubles, The Times might have found itself with far more managerial autonomy. When Andrew Knight had arrived as executive chairman of News International in March 1990, he had been surprised to discover how complicated the command structure was at the senior levels of the paper compared to what he had experienced running the Telegraph Group for Conrad Black. It was necessary to descend to the fifth tier of management before one came to anyone primarily responsible for The Times. Such a layered hierarchy did not necessarily make for clear or responsive decision making. Part of the problem had been created by the specific troubles thrown up by the move to Wapping but the greater issue was that News International consisted of two newspaper groups (NGN for the tabloids and Times Newspapers Limited for the broadsheets) that catered for very different markets and also included Sky, the satellite television venture which was racking up such heavy losses that Knight found himself writing cheques for £2 million (and sometimes £4 million) a week. Within months of arriving at Wapping, Knight had begun to work on a plan that would effectively split NGN and Times Newspapers into separate companies, a solution that he believed would make the respective managements far more responsive to the titles over which they exercised control. Fate intervened. On holiday with the Murdoch family in Aspen, Colorado, Knight suffered a near fatal skiing accident that forced him to take a lengthy period of recuperation. By the time he recovered, the company was fighting for its life and was hardly seeking the managerial distraction of the kind Knight had envisaged. The moment passed.[67]

The company’s attempt to rebuild itself necessarily involved retrenchment. Gus Fischer, News International’s managing director, issued the group’s editors with an edict demanding a 10 per cent across-the-board cut in budget. This was a crippling blow to Jenkins’s upmarket aspirations for The Times. He managed to whittle away Fischer’s initial recommendation that the paper lose 10 per cent of its staff but the economies when they emerged were still severe. Further investment in promotion was postponed and a redundancy package introduced. The cutback that had the most lasting significance came to the parliament page. Looking for somewhere to cut staff, Jenkins concluded that employing a team to sit in the House of Commons and copy down a transaction of the debates was no longer tenable. The Times’s was the only wholly independent newspaper report of parliamentary proceedings, a reporter from the paper always being present in the chamber whenever the Commons was sitting. Each day, an average of thirty-three excerpts from speeches would be printed. The survey evidence suggested it was popular with MPs but Jenkins doubted it was read anywhere much outside the Palace of Westminster’s precincts.[68] So ended a famous tradition and, indeed, one of the paper’s principal claims to being the ‘journal of record’. This tag now largely rested with the continuation of the law reports. It was ironic that the passing of the parliamentary page had happened at the hands of Simon Jenkins rather than Charles Wilson, the supposed downmarket influence who, nonetheless, had not been inclined to take such a risk. Murdoch, too, thought the departure from tradition a mistake, believing it was an important ingredient of what made The Times special.[69] On the other hand, he never interfered to tell Jenkins where the mandatory cuts ought to be made instead.

VI

While the Soviet Union and federal Yugoslavia fell apart (see Chapter Thirteen), the architects of the European Community worked to bring a federal union together. For more than thirty years, the Paris – Bonn axis had been the force at the heart of Europe – the place where John Major now stated he wanted Britain to be. Scrapping the impressively powerful Deutschmark in favour of a new single European currency was part of the bargain that Mitterrand extracted from Kohl as the price for acquiescence in unifying Germany.

When John Major became Prime Minister his true views on European integration were unclear (which was one of the reasons why he was seen as the unity candidate). It was not long, however, before he would be called upon to show his hand. The intergovernmental conference called at the Dutch city of Maastricht in December 1991 would determined whether EMU was waffle or a reality. The United Kingdom had the power of veto. Using it risked demonstrating the country’s isolation from the rest of Europe, whose members might proceed with their own plans regardless, leaving Britain ‘behind’. On the other hand, acquiescing with the federal destiny risked political turmoil at home. This was the dilemma facing a Prime Minister about to go into an election year and still narrowly behind Labour in the opinion polls.

The Times’s position was laid out in a leading article that stretched down the entire page. It was uneasy about the headlong rush towards EMU. Indeed, the paper argued that EMU might actually hamper the fruition of European free trade because ‘there is no evidence that a diverse continental economy becomes more efficient within a framework of centralized decision-taking and fixed internal pricing than when its component parts can adjust costs, taxes and even exchange rates’. It also condemned the Social Chapter which he claimed was ‘centralization gone mad’ and ‘commercial suicide’. ‘In a democracy,’ The Times began it peroration, ‘everybody must know what is being delegated, to whom and why’ and a Maastricht treaty could perform an invaluable function in establishing the functions and limitations of the European Community’s legal competence. But Britain should ‘be outspoken in crying stop’ if, instead, its partners tried to overreach themselves. Indeed:

If no such clarity emerges from Maastricht, the enthusiasm for European cooperation will vanish in dust by the end of the century. Too much power stripped from too many electorates and granted to too many international bodies will induce its own reaction: a nationalist upsurge which no amount of central policing will suppress. EMU and political union will collapse in bitterness and fascism. Then Maastricht will seem like a passing madness, a brief shout of concord choked by its own illusions.[70]

The following morning The Times’s front-page headline boldly announced ‘Major wins all he asked for at Maastricht’ alongside the Prime Minister’s assessment that it was ‘Game, set and match for Britain’. The paper’s reporters from Maastricht – George Brock, Michael Binyon and Robin Oakley – adjudged it a triumph for Major who had won on the issues the press had been briefed he would take a stand on: national opt-outs on the Social Chapter and EMU as well as avoidance of a specific federal commitment in the wording. That the agreement fell short of what his continental partners, and in particular France, wanted only seemed to confirm the extent of the diplomatic victory. The leading article, entitled ‘A Sort of Triumph’ congratulated Major for forcing ‘Maastricht to be sensible’ and the following day went further, describing his diplomacy as ‘an emphatic success’ which kept key decision making with the intergovernmental Council of Ministers rather than ceding it to the Commission or any of the other institutions of doubtful accountability.[71] Indeed, Major certainly appeared to have pulled off a short-term triumph, returning ‘from Maastricht to a hero’s welcome from Tory MPs [who were] in a state of near euphoria’ as Philip Webster reported the mood in Westminster. Peter Riddell was similarly impressed by the Prime Minister’s political and diplomatic skill.[72] The growing number of Euro-sceptics were relieved that he had not irrevocably committed the country to the Social Chapter and EMU while others, most notably enthusiasts in the business community and the City, safely assumed – as Anatole Kaletsky pointed out – that, come the hour, be it in 1997 or 1999, Britain would sign up for EMU rather than risk being left out in the cold.[73] Whether this would be the right course to take, The Times editorial, like the Prime Minister, remained equivocal.[74]

In the meantime, one, or probably two, general elections would intrude. As the spring of 1992 approached, Major opted to go to the polls immediately after a coolly received Budget, with unemployment back up at 2.6 million – nearly one person in ten was now on the dole – and the lowest number of property transactions for a decade. While the recession of the early 1980s had hit hardest areas of Britain that traditionally voted Labour anyway, this time the downturn was affecting the Tory and swing-vote constituencies of London, the South and Southeast. It was not a propitious time for the Conservatives to go to the polls and, having been in power for thirteen years, they could no longer blame past Labour administrations for the country’s ills. For some, the feeling that it was time for a change was sufficient to motivate their desire to vote for it. After all, they reasoned, if Labour could not win now, in these favourable conditions, when could it win?

With the salutary experience of three successive election defeats to point to, Neil Kinnock had pushed the Labour Party not only away from the policies that had contributed towards its humiliation in 1983 but even from the pledges with which he had led it to the polls in 1987. Most conspicuously, the commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament had been dropped though the apparent end of the Cold War downgraded the importance in which defence issues featured among voter concerns. Within a remarkably short period of time, the Labour Party had passed from wanting to withdraw from the European Community to mild Euro-scepticism and now onto positive Europhilia. Labour’s nationalization programme had also been dropped. The party’s emphasis was, instead, increasing the proportion of the national wealth spent by the public sector.

When, halfway through the election campaign, John Smith, the Shadow Chancellor, unveiled his tax plans, the immediate response was broadly positive. Accompanying analysis from the Institute of Fiscal Studies suggested that it would make 80 per cent of the population better off, which was almost 50 per cent more than were set to prosper under the Tory plans. Some felt Smith had scored a knockout punch against his opposite number, Norman Lamont. Yet, while Lamont reeled, Anatole Kaletsky looked at the figures more closely and started landing some punches of his own. In a series of high-profile articles, he accused Smith of deliberately creating ‘a tax structure more punitive to the middle class than any previous Labour government’s’. The financial benefit Labour’s plans gave to the majority was paltry – often a matter of pence – but the compensating hit on the moderately affluent was enormous. ‘Mr Smith,’ Kaletsky thundered, ‘will ensure a collapse in demand for the goods, houses and services bought by the middle class.’ Nor was there even social equity in Labour’s proposals: earned income would be taxed at a higher level than unearned income; headteachers and doctors earning £40,000 a year would pay more tax (about £1700 a year more) than a millionaire living on a £100,000 private income. According to Kaletsky, Smith’s tax plan would hit hardest those in the south-east who ‘could have a crucial impact on the election’.[75] Conservative Central Office seized upon this argument, hoping to woo back this group of disillusioned Tory voters by frightening them with the worse fate John Smith had in store for them. Billboards began to proclaim the new Tory message – ‘Labour’s Tax Bombshell’.

A Labour victory was certainly not in the interests of News International. The party was committed to an enquiry into the concentration of media ownership in Britain and nobody at Wapping was in any doubt about where the concentration would be pinpointed. Jenkins gathered the leader writers and senior lobby journalists to Le Pont de la Tour restaurant and announced that The Times would be endorsing the Conservatives. He paused. Then he asked the assembled to tell him why.

Unlike the two previous general election campaigns, the close nature of the 1992 contest gave added importance to the media coverage. Opinion polls suggested there was a far larger floating vote than had existed in 1987. Mid-campaign, around 80 per cent of readers of The Times and its broadsheet rivals were telling pollsters they were interested in the election compared with a little over half of tabloid readers.[76] As the campaign entered its final phase with media pundits declaring that the Tory strategy was lacklustre, Labour appeared to be heading towards a narrow – but clear – win. Matthew Parris, however, wrote to the contrary. Dispatched to the Sheffield Arena to do a sketch for Kinnoch’s glitzy rally, he had to file before it had got properly underway. But he had seen enough in the ‘media pack’ to gain a reasonable idea of the hubris about to follow:

It is at times of retreat that an army’s strengths can best be observed. It is in moments of triumphalism that we first see the seeds of its downfall. It was when Margaret Thatcher employed a train-bearer to carry her gown that we knew her day was gone. And it was in the slick, cynical image-manipulation of Labour’s spectacular at Sheffield last night that we first sensed the contempt into which they too must come.

Parris listed the pop endorsements and the needless live broadcast of Kinnock’s helicopter touching down, before ending:

Last night in Sheffield, image throttled intellect and a quiet voice in every reporter present whispered that there was something disgusting about the occasion. Those voices will grow. Peter Mandelson has created this Labour Party and, on last night’s showing, Peter Mandelson will destroy it. ‘We will govern,’ Neil Kinnock said opening his speech, ‘as we have campaigned.’

Oh I do hope not.[77]

Kinnock’s excitable performance at Sheffield compared poorly with the old-fashioned manner in which Major fought the campaign, trudging round town centres to stand on a soap box on a street corner. While polls continued to suggest a narrow lead for Labour, they showed that a majority preferred Major to Kinnock. Two days before the polling stations opened, Simon Jenkins wrote a signed article on the Op-Ed page contrasting the leadership styles of the two contenders. They had much in common: ‘Neither needed the help of Oxbridge or family or wealth. There was no apprenticeship in the patronage of a great union or the entourage of a Tory grandee. Grammar school and personal ambition looked after them both.’ Yet, for all his policy U-turns, ‘a search for substance in the verbosity of a Kinnock speech, reveals little more than the foggy egalitarianism that has moved him since he entered the Commons in 1970’. By contrast, Jenkins wrote approvingly that ‘Maastricht was John Major’s coming of age as a prime minister’ and what he lacked in popular appeal he more than made up for by being good at the ‘dull business’ of government.[78] The full-page Times leading article endorsing the Tories concerned itself with issues rather than personalities, but it did conclude with a final observation that Major ‘has emerged during his brief reign as prime minister as a likeable, competent and honest leader of his country’.[79]

On election morning, Oakley’s front-page report warned of a ‘cliffhanger’. MORI opinion polls suggested that the Tories were making a late comeback, from a seven-point deficit a week earlier to only 1 per cent behind on the eve of poll. A hung government appeared likely with Ashdown as the power broker. Having endorsed the Tories the previous day and with opinion polls suggesting a strengthening support for the Liberal Democrats, The Times editorial on election morning warned voters against doing anything that made a hung government or its adoption in perpetuity through proportional representation more likely.[80]

In the event, the horse trading of a hung parliament was avoided. After a tense evening in which exit polls had pointed to conflicting results, the early morning editions of The Times for 10 April proclaimed the Conservatives’ victory. It was an extraordinary turnaround – although Major restricted himself to the observation that the result had been ‘satisfactory’. In fact, the Tories were the first party to win four general elections in succession since the restricted franchises of the early nineteenth century. Major’s twenty-one-seat majority was a slim one but sufficient to govern unaided. Kinnock’s achievement was to have made his party almost electable. It was not enough and he immediately announced his intention to step down. The Liberal Democrat breakthrough was once again postponed for another election.

Twelve of the twenty-one daily and Sunday national newspapers endorsed the Conservatives (representing a total sale of over eighteen million) compared to five who backed Labour (8.6 million sales) while four (with 1.5 million copies) refused to endorse any party. Having its polling-day front page announcing ‘If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights’, the Sun greeted the results with the proclamation, ‘It’s the Sun Wot Won It!’ Certainly there appeared to be a last-minute swing towards the Tories from readers of Tory-supporting papers which had pulled out all the journalistic stops of persuasion – and abuse – when it looked like Kinnock might win. The extent to which the swing was a consequence of the editorial line was, of course, hard to gauge. MORI identified a 4 per cent swing from Sun readers towards the Tories in the final week of campaigning. But there was a 2.5 per cent swing towards the Tories from readers of the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror. Having taken an even-handed approach, Today’s last-minute endorsement of the Conservatives appeared to make little appreciable difference. The limited influence of the press was best expressed by the FT which announced it was time for Labour and saw the proportion of its readers voting Conservative rise by 7 per cent in the final week to 65 per cent.[81] As far as The Times’s role in the verdict of 1992 was concerned, Anatole Kaletsky’s analysis of Labour’s tax plans probably had the greatest effect. The moderately affluent but hard-working families he suggested would be hit hardest by John Smith’s proposals resembled a significant section of the newspaper’s core readership.

Whether the opinions expressed in the national newspapers swung the election remains a moot point. Yet, the result did nothing to dissuade those at Labour headquarters that – at the risk of style over substance – winning over the media would be central to victory in 1997. For the moment, though, it was Major who appeared to have the bright future before him. Within forty-eight hours of the Tory victory, Peter Riddell was prophesying the coming parliamentary term in which the Conservatives’ health and education reforms would reach fruition with most large hospitals becoming trusts, most GPs becoming independent fundholders and a wave of schools seeking grant-maintained status. As for the issue of Europe, ‘potential splits within the Tory party over the EC which might have arisen in opposition should be avoidable’. The Conservative Party, Riddell suggested, now appeared ‘to be not only the natural party of government but also perhaps the perpetual one, like the Liberal Democrats in Japan’.[82]

VII

On 19 January 1991, in the midst of the Gulf War, The Times introduced the greatest change to its front page since replacing advertisements with news there in 1966. A colour photograph appeared. Being The Times, the extent of this revolution was modified by demonstrating the amazing new colour facility with a photograph of the night sky. The depiction was, however, Baghdad nocturne. The darkness was broken up with shards of light as the city came under air attack. For The Times, it heralded a new dawn.

In the past, colour had largely been restricted to the Saturday supplements and for some advertisements. This had been made possible by using pre-printed gravure colour, but the process was expensive and needed considerable pre-planning. Eddy Shah’s Today had been the first national daily to use ROP (run of paper) colour printing, although the results had not always been satisfactory. It was in response to Robert Maxwell’s decision to print the Daily Mirror with colour that the reluctant Murdoch had finally been persuaded to purchase colour presses for Wapping, Knowsley on Merseyside and Kinning Park in Glasgow. Thus The Times became the beneficiary of an investment made primarily to boost Murdoch’s tabloid sales. For The Times, the revolution was more gradual than the dramatic explosions depicted on the first edition suggested. Technological problems and limited colour availability often ensured that the paper was still largely a monochrome product in the months ahead. Annoyingly, when colour was available, it was not always possible to run it on the front page where its use had most visual impact. There were a few readers for whom any obvious improvement was nonetheless a retrograde step, but as colour photography began, however slowly, to manifest itself with increasing frequency in the paper so it gave The Times a chance to appeal to a population which, used to colour television, had developed a more bright and visual expectation of news presentation.

Towards the end of the year, the paper underwent another change of appearance. On 25 November 1991, The Times changed its typeface. Between 1932 and 1972 it had been set in Times New Roman, a revolutionary font designed by the paper’s typographer, Stanley Morison, that established itself as the most popular typeface in the world. In 1972, the paper had adopted the subtly modified Times Europa which was clearer on the Linotype machinery and lighter paper then being used. Changes in typesetting called for the revision of 1991. Times New Roman and its derivatives had been designed for the old hot metal machinery. Times Millennium, the work of Aurobind Patel, was designed with the effect of computer typesetting in mind. The task of overseeing its introduction fell to David Driver, the paper’s design editor. By producing less chunky text, it enabled more words to be fitted in while increasing the amount of white space on the page. The result looked smarter and was generally considered stylish although the reader reaction suggested that the vast majority of the public scarcely registered any difference – which was not necessarily a bad sign. It was digitized type for what was becoming a digitized newspaper. On 18 September 1992, the last cut and paste bromide page was made up for The Times. Thereafter, the paper was totally set by electronic page make-up.

Where The Times was falling behind was in its availability across the European continent. There, the FT had led the way, with editions for the European market printed from Frankfurt in 1979, followed by satellite printing in the United States, in New Jersey in 1985 and at a site near Lille in 1988. The results were impressive. By the end of the decade, the FT was selling ninety-thousand copies abroad and had effectively seen off the challenge from the Wall Street Journal’s Europe edition on the Continent. By 1990, the Guardian and the Independent were also being printed in Europe and it was essential that The Times, with an overseas sale of 22,000 daily, followed suit as soon as the expensive refitting of Wapping could be completed.[83] Jenkins was understandably impatient to see this achieved, not least because the continental editions of The Times’s rivals were what nudged them ahead in the circulation figures.[84] Such was his desperation that he even suggested News International should consider buying the imperilled European, partly to stop it falling into a rivals’ hands and partly to use it as the core for a new-look European first or weekly edition of The Times.[85] In the event, it was not until November 1995 that The Times transmitted its second edition via satellite to a printing plant near Charleroi in Belgium to reach newsstands across Europe and the Middle East before the morning rush hour.

The editor had good reason to be anxious about sales. In October 1990, The Times, having put its price up by five pence, slipped back behind the Guardian. In the succeeding months, the Guardian started stretching its lead (while the Telegraph remained seemingly unassailable with over one million daily sales). More alarmingly, far from being beaten back by Jenkins’s upmarket pitch, the Independent had cut the daily sales deficit with The Times from twenty thousand in January 1990 to four thousand a year later. In April 1992, its daily sales overtook The Times. It was a blip and by June The Times had regained a 14,000 lead. But the damage was done. Jenkins had promised to repel the Independent’s tanks from The Times’s lawn. Instead, two years into his tenure (the time in which he had asked to do the job) the Independent’s gun barrels were nudging the front door.

Ironically, the moment in which the Independent appeared to be on the brink of breaking The Times was also the moment when the young pretender to the upmarket readership had critically overstretched itself. Goaded by the prospect of the Sunday Correspondent cornering a market in which it believed it had a right to make money for itself, the Independent had launched the Independent on Sunday. This succeeded in its primary aims of closing down the Correspondent and in building a fair-sized circulation for the IoS (or Sindy) in its own right. But as the advertising recession began to take effect, so problems for the Sindy mounted and it began to drain the group’s profitability. During 1991, the Sunday paper’s loses hovered around £6 million. Resources that could have been deployed by the Independent against The Times were, instead, redeployed to shore up the Sunday battlefront. Whittam Smith sought a solution by attempting to integrate the Sunday operation with the weekday paper, cutting jobs – among which was that of his one-time friend and fellow Independent founding father, Stephen Glover. The Independent went from being a profitable business sensation to a desperate organization in search of a moneyed rescuer. It was the perfect moment for The Times to counterattack but that would need fresh investment. This was still some months away.

The foundations of hope were News International’s improving financial situation. The company was clawing itself back from the brink and Sky, the great money drainer, at last had rosier prospects. During 1992, The Times began to expand again. It had more columns of editorial content than its broadsheet rivals.[86] Jenkins had told Murdoch he wanted two years to turn the paper around. It was clear he would need a little more in order to prove his efforts had a commercial return. Murdoch’s impatience was assumed when word went round that one of his closest associates, Irwin Stelzer, had joked at a News Corp. conference that The Times was the newspaper one hid within one’s copy of the Sun. In fact, neither Murdoch nor Andrew Knight were determined to be done with Jenkins. Giving him a five-year contract was even mooted. Jenkins, however, was reluctant to commit to more than one year at a time and had, of course, told his wife that he wanted out within the end of his third year.[87] Faced with this, the proprietor and his chief executive began to look for a candidate who wanted to settle into the post for a longer spell. It was their choice of replacement, rather more than their decision to replace Jenkins several months earlier than he had hoped, that caused a breakdown in relations.

Knight believed a possible successor to Jenkins could be Paul Dacre, the editor of the Evening Standard. Knight told Murdoch that Dacre had an unparalleled combination of ‘drive, intellect and overall grasp’.[88] When they met, Dacre impressed Murdoch with his commanding view of how The Times’s fortunes could be improved. Murdoch offered Dacre the editorship. Dacre confirmed he was interested but pointed out that as a matter of courtesy he would not do a deal while his employer, Vere Rothermere, was out of the country.[89] It was then that things started to fall apart. Murdoch telephoned Jenkins to tell him that he thought Dacre could be a worthy successor. The prospect hit Jenkins like a hammer blow. He was aghast at the thought that all the effort he had put into taking the paper upmarket was about to be casually undone. He told Murdoch, in no uncertain terms, that the idea was disastrous and that staff morale would collapse if Dacre was appointed. Murdoch, it seemed, was about to ditch Jenkins’s upmarket strategy. Given that Jenkins had originally asked for only two years to do the job he could not really complain at being taken at face value. ‘At the time, I was upset not because I was stopping being editor, but because of Dacre,’ he later claimed, adding, ‘the person I thought should succeed was Peter Stothard’.[90] Tense days passed while Jenkins ruminated on the possibility that all his efforts to save The Times from a mid-market fate were about to be thrown away by a proprietor who simply did not understand what was special about his prize possession.

If such a mid-market fate was in store, it was not to come from Paul Dacre. When he told Rothermere that he was considering accepting the job at The Times, the Associated Newspapers owner offered him the editorship of the Daily Mail instead. Rothermere and Dacre had long worked well together and Dacre decided to stay in the fold by accepting the task of steering the Mail.[91] The appearance in the Associated-owned Evening Standard of the news that Dacre had been approached by The Times but had rebuffed the offer was acutely embarrassing for Jenkins because it brought into the public domain that his time as editor was up before he had made any such announcement. Dacre went on to preside over a decade of strong growth at the Daily Mail, for which success he was loathed by metropolitan liberal opinion. Murdoch, however, appeared unruffled by the rejection and after he had seen the campaigning approach Dacre brought to the Mail later reflected that he would not have been right for The Times.[92] This was also the opinion of most senior journalists at The Times.[93]

With the news of the Dacre offer leaked, it was important to get on with finding a replacement who would accept the job. Various ideas were mooted, including seeking an appointment from outside the industry.[94] Knight telephoned Charles Wilson at his new perch at Mirror Group Newspapers, asking who he thought would make the best editor. Wilson replied that there were two serious candidates, Peter Stothard and John Bryant, and that whichever was not given the office should serve as deputy.[95] On 23 July, it was announced that Peter Stothard would succeed Simon Jenkins when he stepped down as editor in October.

VII

The handling and timing of Jenkins’s departure was poor. When he stepped down, the Independent was still breathing down The Times’s neck and, judged purely by circulation, he had failed in his objectives. Had he stayed on, the Independent’s challenge would have crumbled, not least under the weight of its own mounting financial problems. It was finally being confronted with the very problems that had dogged Jenkins, whose editorship had coincided with a spending freeze caused by News Corp.’s near collapse. The budget for promoting The Times had been decimated. It was Jenkins’s misfortune that he left just as the parent company’s fortunes were recovering and a massive investment in the paper would become possible.

The sorrow among staff at his departure was generally less strongly felt than the joy at his initial appointment. Partly, this was because the journalists felt comfortable with Peter Stothard as a replacement. In transforming The Times into a newspaper he thought good enough to write for himself, Jenkins had been single-minded and ruthless. This was a way to turn around a newspaper but not to win the affection of its employees. He had not taken the trouble to cultivate friendships. He drew comfort from a wide range of cultural interests and in a personal life that resided outside the windowless warehouse of Wapping. Towards colleagues, Charlie Wilson’s line of invective had been far stronger and he had frequently seemed on the point of doing someone a personal injury, but he had also shown a tender streak towards those in trouble or in need of help. For all his occasional roughness, Wilson always had an easy relationship with his backbench: ‘like a Field Marshal enjoying the company of his generals’, as one of the backbench’s most accomplished practitioners, Simon Pearson, put it.[96] Jenkins was far more self-assured in his manner. He had a clear idea about what he wanted and this was not in keeping with a collegiate approach. It did not translate into familiar badinage. The vehemence of his attitude when errors appeared in the paper even earned him the enmity of some who thought his response disproportionate. In this sense, he was a leader more interested in being feared than loved.

Yet, reflecting on his experience of five Times editors, the financial editor, Graham Searjeant, took the view that Jenkins was the one who ‘saved the paper.’[97] He was right to insist on the highest standards if it was to have any hope of regaining its former reputation for accuracy. Whether The Times sunk or swam was ultimately a better judgment of his tenure than whether he was aloof to some of his staff. He had worked incredibly hard. He had stayed in the office well into the evening, taking the 8.30 conference where the first edition was analysed and modified, before leaving for an evening of social engagements only to return to the office at 11.30 to take charge once again. Had he benefited, as his successor did, from a night editor of the skill and self-confidence of David Ruddock, he might have felt able to leave the backbench more to its own devices. He was also hampered by the departure of John Bryant as deputy editor, another journalist who understood the nuts and bolts of putting a paper to bed. Happily, he was able to welcome Bryant back as deputy editor before leaving the chair himself, but Bryant’s professional touch was missed for most of Jenkins’s editorship.

Jenkins viewed his own two years in the chair with satisfaction: ‘We just about stabilised the circulation but the most important thing to me was to reverse the loss of reputation.’[98] He had very effectively spiked the guns of those who asserted that The Times lacked its former intellectual vigour. In focusing on hiring specialists, Jenkins helped the paper to regain its reputation as a source of information and good writing, and not just a new-sorientated paper written by reporters. This was important. In Anatole Kaletsky he had hired one of the foremost economic commentators of the age. Another perceptive journalist brought over from the FT was Peter Riddell who would similarly play a major and steadying role in the years ahead. In particular, The Times regained from the Independent the initiative over arts coverage, thanks in no small part to the contributions of Marcus Binney, Richard Cork and Rodney Milnes.

No editor of The Times believed he left the paper in a worse position than he found it, but there was much truth in Jenkins’s own assessment, that, had he not taken charge in 1990:

The programme that Whittam Smith undertook in 1986 to wipe out The Times would, I think, have been ultimately successful and we stopped it. That is the single biggest contribution I made, by boosting the morale of the paper and hiring particular people who were still all there ten years later. I said to Rupert, ‘I’ve done what I wanted to do, which is what you told me to do – to make it a paper I would want to write a column for.’[99]

He wrote his column for the next twelve and a half years.

CHAPTER TEN

CRITICAL TIMES

The New Editor; the Price War; Sport;

the Arts; Beauty; Science; the Internet

I

Judged by his appointments, Rupert Murdoch did not have a settled idea about what sort of man should be an editor of The Times. In choosing Harold Evans he wanted a dynamic leader with a strong news sense who would bring to the paper some of the excitement that he had brought to the Sunday Times. Yet, when Murdoch’s patience ran out with Evans he turned to Charles Douglas-Home, an editor more in the Rees-Mogg mould, whose primary interest was in considered comment and engagement with ideas. Next, the proprietor turned back in search of a strong news editor, which he found in Charles Wilson. Yet, within five years he had decided that The Times needed a less abrasive and more contemplative sage in the shape of Simon Jenkins. Each editor in succession appeared to be either a news editor or an Op-Ed editor writ large. The initial approach to Paul Dacre suggested Murdoch’s next instinct was to swing the pendulum back towards a hard news editor with a flair for campaigning journalism. Instead, in selecting Peter Stothard, he performed a volte-face, deciding in favour of another Op-Ed man in succession to Jenkins.

In fact, Peter Stothard appeared to fulfil several requirements. He had the intellectual engagement and breadth of interests that were to be expected of a traditional Times editor. Indeed, no previous occupant of the chair had such a grasp or passion for Latin and Greek literature. Yet he had none of the mannered, old-fashioned, donnish demeanour that suggested he would attempt to disengage The Times from the modern world. He was forty-one. His father had worked on radar research for Marconi[1] and he had grown up in Essex, going to Brentwood School, which provided a good independent education without being in the senior ranks of the more illustrious public schools. Up at Trinity College, Oxford, to read Classics he had arrived armed with a case containing his father’s old blue-green-yellow cricket blazer (not that the son had a well-honed interest in sport) and his grandfather’s faded edition of the second six books of Virgil’s Aeneid. A contemporary there, Stephen Glover (later one of the three founders of the Independent) subsequently predicated the myth that Stothard had spent his undergraduate days wandering by the Isis in a kaftan.[2] This was far from the truth for he was neither a college hearty nor a dreamer. Instead, he edited Cherwell and counted among his friends there George Brock and the future novelist Sally Emerson and her friend Tina Brown. Indeed, Stothard had developed the characteristics that were looked on with favour at News International. He was astute, intelligent and well educated but belonged to a generation that was meritocratic and open-minded.

One of the legacies to come out of Stothard’s period as The Times’s comment editor and deputy editor during the 1980s had been his role in scouting out young talent. The training scheme he established brought a new generation of the bright and the ambitious directly from university to The Times, a fast-track policy which undoubtedly attracted many to journalism who might otherwise have been lured elsewhere by the increasing financial returns offered by business and the professions. Other newspapers subsequently emulated this policy. The consequence was a marked increase in the number of journalists on major newspapers with excellent degrees from the leading universities – although those who liked their news pages unvarnished and without adjectives came to regret the effect that employing writers with analytical skills and the opinions that came with them had on ‘straight’ reporting. For Stothard, the short step from Broad Street to Fleet Street had not been so straightforward. After Oxford, he had experimented with various careers. At one stage he was employed by an advertising agency working on the Cadburys chocolate account while his neighbour on the next desk ran the campaign to boost The Times’s sales. Out of the corner of his eye, Stothard registered the attempt to sell the struggling paper’s charms. Yet it was into broadcast journalism that he next went, spending three years as a BBC trainee working on the Today programme. In 1977, he appeared to put the hack’s life behind him and, determined upon a career in management, joined Shell. But the journalistic instinct remanifested itself. He began writing a number of scoops in New Society. This brought him to the attention of the Sunday Times, where he was brought in as a business and political correspondent. There, he became a protégé of Harold Evans. In 1980 Stothard married Sally Emerson and the following year Evans married Tina Brown. Evans took him across the bridge to The Times. There, Stothard found himself alongside Anthony Holden and Bernard Donoughue as a core member of the editor’s praetorian guard. Some were surprised when, unlike Holden and Donoughue, he did not resign when Evans was tipped out of his chair in 1982. Instead, Stothard stayed put and prospered under the incoming Douglas-Home dispensation, becoming features editor and, soon after, chief leader writer. Charles Wilson also thought highly of him, making him deputy editor when Colin Webb left to take up his post at the Press Association. Stothard held onto the title in 1989 when he moved over to Washington DC, to became The Times’s US editor.

Stothard gained from the experience of overseeing the paper’s American coverage and filing regular and penetrating commentary from Washington even though – or perhaps because – it removed him from the daily skirmishes for power and position at Wapping. The Times remained, after all, a paper with an international profile and an American-based owner who expected his executives to have an equally non-parochial attitude. Out in Washington, Stothard had proved that he was not the sort of delicate desk-bound writer who could only thrive within the enclosed and somewhat claustrophobic atmosphere of the windowless rum warehouse off Pennington Street.

Whether from Wapping or Washington, Stothard had spent the 1980s watching the attempt of successive Times editors to confront increasing and improving competition, from traditional newspaper rivals, from other media like radio and television and from the new claimant for the paper’s core market – the Independent. Simon Jenkins had identified the latter as the principal threat. Indeed, he had been appointed as the man to repulse its tanks from the front lawn. In this respect he had failed and by the time he passed the chair on to Stothard, the Independent’s position had only strengthened. Circulation between the old and new claimants to informed opinion was running neck and neck.

No sooner had Stothard settled behind the editor’s desk than he acted decisively. A wave of sackings was announced. In all, more than twenty journalists were fired. The ‘Life and Times’ section – which Jenkins regarded as one of his achievements – was axed, having failed to attract much advertising. The prize scalp, however, was that of Clifford Longley. The chief leader writer and religious affairs correspondent had been at The Times for a quarter of a century and had been the journalists’ NUJ chapel father. The Economist credited him with being the last of the Times Black-friars.[3] The manner of the sacking caused ill feeling that went beyond the two protagonists. Relations further deteriorated in early 1994 when The Times printed an article by Dr Tim Bradshaw, the Dean of Regent’s Park College, Oxford, that named Longley as one of a corps of Roman Catholic journalists who were motivated by malice in their analysis of the Church of England. Backed with legal assistance by his new employers at the Telegraph (who had also been criticized in the article), Longley instigated legal action not only against the author and The Times but also against Stothard personally. He won damages and his legal costs.[4]

There were other changes. Stothard’s arrival as editor coincided with the departure of the political editor, Robin Oakley, who was offered and accepted the same post at the BBC. Peter Riddell replaced him initially, but in a reshuffle in 1993 Philip Webster was made political editor while the post he had held as chief political correspondent since 1986 was passed to Nicholas Wood. Riddell, meanwhile, was free to write his daily political commentary. This was a formula that the other newspapers adopted too (and had its echo in the broadcast soliloquies of the BBC’s successive political editors, John Cole, Robin Oakley and, most especially, Andrew Marr). The concern about this development was that it meant mixing up comment and news on the same page with all the resulting possibilities that the former could contaminate the latter. Yet, so long as Riddell’s articles were properly displayed as a commentary there was little real danger of it causing any more confusion than Matthew Parris’s parliamentary sketches. Riddell certainly had his own view – he was, for example, sympathetic to the pro-European cause – but unlike a celebrity columnist he was not a hired controversialist. His observations could not be faulted for their deliberative qualities or their equanimity of expression.

Stothard, meanwhile, brought on several rising talents. Daniel Johnson became literary editor. Another who appeared destined for great things was Matthew D’Ancona, a Fellow of All Souls and who, like Johnson, had a First in History from Magdalen College, Oxford. Still only twenty-three, his route to The Times had been through the graduate traineeship. Initially set to work writing education stories, D’Ancona was identified by the new editor as a journalist with a good political brain who could write on a range of issues. As far as the outside world was concerned, perhaps the greatest sign that all was well came not from the promotion of younger voices but in the return of an older one. In January 1993, William Rees-Mogg returned to The Times to write a column for the Op-Ed page on Mondays and Wednesdays. Lord Rees-Mogg of Hinton Blewitt (as he had been since his elevation to the House of Lords in 1988) not only brought all the authority of a senior journalist with forty years experience but also his personal acquaintance with many of the major figures in the political and media Establishment. During the course of the past decade he had been the chairman of several publishing companies, chairman of the Arts Council, vice-chairman of the BBC’s board of governors, and chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Commission as well as a director on several company boards, including GEC. Not only was Rees-Mogg’s return a boon for the paper, it was a blow to the Independent’s desire to be seen as the embodiment of the finest traditions of the pre-Wapping Times (Rees-Mogg’s earlier stint as a columnist for the Independent had hurt many Times journalists who treated it as if it was a personal rebuke). The Independent was hit further with the departure of Alexander Chancellor who went to New York, from where he filed a weekly Saturday column for The Times throughout 1993.

There were also presentational changes to the paper. Some of Jenkins’s more conservative design instincts were also jettisoned. Headlines began to increase in size again and colour printing was used wherever there was the capacity to provide it. This reversed Jenkins’s more reticent approach that restricted colour photography to images that he thought specifically deserved it. The Times was no longer a definitively black and white product. Puffs above the masthead had started appearing on the Saturday editions in 1988 to advertise the highlights within Charlie Wilson’s four-section paper. The expansion of special features during the weekdays was an argument in favour of running the puff above (or below – opinion shifted on the question of their placement) the masthead during the week as well. Given the extra sales that could be put on by drawing the attention of passers-by to the paper’s contents in this way it was not surprising that when Stothard became editor they were made a fixed daily feature, running below the masthead. The commercial argument could not be countered. Aesthetically, they were an affront. The wider and more garish graphics the puff strip contained, the more the outward appearance of seriousness was debased.

Marketing The Times was a difficult process. Those who wanted to read Rees-Mogg on Monday did not necessarily want a huge puff on the front page screaming about goals galore at Stamford Bridge or the pick of the Paris fashion show. Nor could the columns on the Op-Ed page be expected to appeal to the size of audience The Times needed to survive. Spending money on television campaigns was a fast route to wasting millions. Targeting a specific audience appeared to make much more sense. An opportunity for this came from an unlikely source. In 1993 the World Chess Federation, FIDE, was plunged into crisis when Russia’s Garry Kasparov and Britain’s Nigel Short rejected the proposed match fee. Instead they established their own Professional Chess Federation. The Times agreed to sponsor the new tournament with a £1.7 million investment that would pit the two men against one another in what would be called The Times World Chess Championship. Extensively trailed in the paper, broadcast by Channel 4 and staged at the Savoy Theatre, Stothard envisaged it as a great way of promoting the paper’s association with thoughtfulness and strategic thinking. The paper’s chess correspondent, Raymond Keene, provided commentary and analysis in The Times while Simon Barnes wrote the sketch. There was even a friendly match between Short and Daniel Johnson. The main event, however, turned out less satisfactorily than its promoters had hoped. Short’s poor run of form reduced the contest as a sporting spectacle. The Times World Chess Championship proved to be a one-off tournament. Stothard was left to conclude, ‘Chess politics, I discovered, was probably the most difficult and unpleasant politics of any sort.’[5] The issue of how to get more readers remained. An altogether grander plan was devised.

II

When Rupert Murdoch bought The Times in 1981 the intention was to make it profitable within five years. This he achieved. When the paper celebrated its bicentenary in 1985 it had finally moved into the black. Yet, this was to be a temporary phenomenon. The move to Wapping helped ensure News International’s strategic profitability although, in the short term, The Time’s share of Wapping’s start-up costs harmed its own financial figures. Wapping created the conditions in which the paper could modernize and expand – opportunities that required fresh investment rather than cost cutting. The conquering of one costly process – for instance, the reduction of union-protected overmanning in the print hall – was quickly succeeded by the realization of a new expense, like the introduction of colour presses. The revitalized competition, in particular the Independent and Conrad Black’s Daily Telegraph, were also investing in bigger and brighter papers. The Times could not stand still and risk the destruction of its market share. The costs continued to spiral accordingly. A freer market behaved as expected, competition suiting the consumer rather better than the producer.

If The Times had a fresh opportunity to balance its books then there was no better period than the latter stages of the Lawson boom when advertising demand was at a premium. The profitability of the Sunday Times, with its 1.3 million circulation, ensured that Times Newspapers Limited announced a £20.2 million profit in June 1998. The opportunity existed for The Times to be profitable in its own right. Its advertising revenue increased by 38 per cent between 1987 and 1989. Unfortunately, production and editorial (salaries, expenses, etc.) costs soared well above inflation during the period too. The hope that improved advertising sales would bridge this gap proved illusionary. The onset of the recession abruptly ended any thought of pressing on into the black. Advertising revenue was decimated. Businesses stopped advertising for vacancies, luxury products became even more of an unaffordable indulgence and the sun began to set on the holiday market. By 1991–2, advertising was providing only half of the paper’s revenue.[6]

The only positive aspect of the economic slowdown was that it was affecting The Times’s rivals too. Indeed, during the recession, the paper’s advertising department outperformed many of its competitors, showing resourcefulness in reduced circumstances. This was demonstrated by its ability to keep its position in the newspaper advertising market. Its 22 per cent share in 1991 was the same as during the boom time of 1987 and was only 1 per cent behind the leader, the Telegraph. Not only did it keep the Independent marginalized, The Times did significantly better than the FT which saw its share slide from nearly a quarter of the market in 1987 to less than a fifth by 1991.

With falling advertising revenue, the paper attempted to recoup its losses by raising the cover price. A paper that had cost its purchaser twenty-three pence on the eve of Wapping in 1986 had gradually crept up to thirty pence during the summer of 1990. From then, as the recession took its toll, the price hikes became more frequent. Between 1990 and 1993 the cost of The Times rose from thirty to forty-five pence, a 50 per cent increase. As with advertising rates, the paper’s situation was only eased by the reality that its competitors were in no position to outmanoeuvre it. At forty-five pence, The Times was the same price as the Independent and the Guardian and three pence cheaper that the Daily Telegraph. On Saturdays, all sold at fifty pence except for The Telegraph which cost sixty pence. The FT, meanwhile, was retailing during the week at a stately sixty-five pence.

Unsurprisingly, price increases during a period in which recession was forcing households to make economies had a negative effect on sales. Both the broadsheet and the tabloid market contracted. By January 1993, nearly a quarter of a million fewer national broadsheets were being sold every day than in 1989. The Times had lost 65,000 daily sales over the period. The question was how to entice the readers back. Simon Jenkins had maintained that it was about producing a quality newspaper. This, indeed, was the conventional wisdom. It was not just The Times that was investing in producing extra sections, better print quality and colour. All were seeking to add value to the product. Newspaper strategy had assumed the centrality of building and fostering reader loyalty. This was seen as a matter of investment. Although it was difficult to deny that the price increases had made papers less attractive on the newsstand, opinion in Fleet Street and in the City was still broadly that the national broadsheets were catering for a market that was more quality than price led. The belief that a largely middle class, and in the case of The Times often professional, readership would switch brand identity for the sake of saving a few pence a week was widely doubted.

This appeared to be the view among the senior management at News International. Both Murdoch and Andrew Knight were enthusiastic about an idea that Rees-Mogg and Anatole Kaletsky advocated during 1992. They wanted to replace the existing second section (which had eight pages of business news and four of sport) by a completely tabloid pull-out containing forty-eight pages of business and eight of sport. The intention was to trump the FT (28 per cent of whose readers were already also reading The Times) with a section that would provide yet more detailed analysis of financial sectors. It would also permit The Times to increase its cover price towards the FT’s level. The idea was eventually dropped because the production cost was simply too expensive.[7] Instead, from 12 October 1992, sport was moved to the back of the main part of the paper and a new second section was created containing business and arts news, controversially countering the previous assumption that business and sport were the subjects men wanted together on their commute to the office. Opinion was sharply divided over whether this new arrangement made sense but it was, at least, not as costly as the innovation floated by Rees-Mogg and Kaletsky.

What was remarkable was how quickly News International challenged the conventional wisdom (including its own) over price versus quality. Within months of taking seriously a plan that would have once again increased the cover price, Murdoch threw himself behind a radical scheme to slash the cover price of The Times. Certainly, investment had not been shown to improve the paper’s market share. Indeed, despite heavy promotion, its sale had slipped by over 6 per cent in the first six months of 1993 compared to the same period the previous year. Its lead over the Independent, at twenty thousand, was uncomfortably small, especially given the financial constraints and lack of promotion with which the latter paper had been forced to operate during the period. The narrow margin looked particularly alarming when it became evident that the Independent had plans in motion for rejuvenation focused on improving quality over cost. It was gearing up for an autumn relaunch that would bring expansion, new sections and colour to the news pages. The moment, it seemed, had come in which The Times would be comprehensively eclipsed by its newer rival. Such a turn of events would do great psychological damage to The Times’s esteem. What was more, as market analysts could relate, once a newspaper started upon a prolonged downward trajectory, it was very difficult to reverse the trend. Identification as only the fourth best-selling broadsheet (behind the Telegraph, Guardian and Independent) would force down advertising rates, reducing revenue and making investment in the product impossible. The Times had to act fast before it was sucked into this downward spiral. Most analysts and the executive chairman, Andrew Knight, advised investing in the product. Murdoch decided they were wrong.

Like many important decisions, the one to launch the price war came from what appeared at the time to be a throwaway remark. Murdoch was over in Wapping to see what difference a price cut at the Sun was having on sales and bumped into Stothard in a corridor. A brief conversation ensued during which Murdoch proffered the (seemingly) off-the-cuff question, ‘Do you think the Sun’s experiment would work for The Times?’ Stothard had independently come to the view that further cover price increases should be resisted but, given the great expense involved in actually making a cut, he had not seriously considered reversing the trend. Nonetheless, almost without pause to weigh the possibilities, he replied that, yes, he thought a price cut could work.[8] It was a bold response. Whether the Sun’s economics also applied to the The Times had never been properly tested. The tabloid market had been in a long period of declining circulation. Although it remained the market leader, the Sun had lost half a million sales in the past five years (1988–93). Yet the paper’s price cut in July 1993 to twenty pence proved an immediate stimulant: its sale soared by 368,000 in the following month. This took its share of the tabloid market above 50 per cent, good news for the Sun and ultimately for the fortunes of News International upon which The Times depended. Yet what appealed to the readers of ‘The Sun Says’ and page three would not necessarily translate to the paper of Bernard Levin and Court & Social. In any case, some argued that it was not so much more readers, but richer readers, that The Times needed.

This was an age-old argument. In a good year, around 70 per cent of The Times’s revenue came from advertising. Thus, halving the cover price would have an effect on less than 9 per cent of the paper’s revenue. The intention certainly appeared explicable enough – to recoup this loss by gaining new readers and thereby a richer market for advertisers to target. However, experience suggested the equation was not so simple. In 1967 The Times had successfully gone in search of new readers but the expense involved in attracting them was greater than the volume of high-quality advertising they brought with them. With costs spiralling out of control, the growth strategy had been abandoned in 1970 and the paper duly contracted, retreating back to serving its core third of a million readers. Unfortunately, that too failed to make the paper profitable. Thus it tried again in 1984, when Portfolio was launched. This time advertising revenue did pick up although because the economy was recovering after a period of deep recession this was to be expected. When, in late 1985, the circulation reached a plateau, many assumed this was the physical limit of the paper’s reach.

A new price cut strategy was predicated upon proving the paper did not have a natural plateau that was less than half of what the Daily Telegraph sold every day. Yet, if the experiences of 1967–70 were not to be repeated, the ‘right sort’ of readers had to be attracted. These were the readers who would be especially appealing to advertisers with expensive products to market. If the price cut only attracted students, manual workers and parsimonious pensioners in genteel retirement in Eastbourne, it would never pay its way. The objective was to attract younger professionals with disposable income. Apart from the fact that advertisers preferred them, there was also a longer-term payback if the strategy made lifelong Times readers out of those who had forty years of newspaper purchasing ahead of them rather than old-age pensioners who had just a few. The problem was that most analysts believed the only people who would respond favourably to a price cut were the very lower income groups that advertisers spurned.

Thus, cutting the price of The Times was a highly risky strategy taken against most of the prevailing wisdom. It would be expensive, especially given the decision that the reduced price would be deducted from the company’s share of each sale, and not by reducing the margins of the wholesaler or retailer (for each forty-five pence proffered at the newsagent the retailer would keep twelve pence and, after the wholesaler had taken his cut, News International received back only twenty-sevnty pence). If the paper cut its price to thirty pence, as was now suggested, News International would receive only around twelve pence per copy. Considering it cost nearer thirteen pence to print each copy, this was arithmetic that could not be profitable without encouraging a giant surge in advertising revenue.

Despite all this, Murdoch gave his blessing. Having narrowly escaped bankruptcy in 1990, News Corp. was back in expansionary mode. The satellite television company Sky had bought out its competition to form British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) and appeared to be coming out of its financial difficulties. In August 1993, News International announced that profits had soared, year on year, from £48 to £161 million. This was the moment to risk short-term losses assisting The Times in order to steal a march on the competition. On 2 August, The Times began a trial run of the effect of a price cut by cutting the cover price by fifteen pence to thirty pence to thirty pence in Kent, beyond London’s M25 orbital. In the first three weeks, sales went up by almost 14 per cent. This was the confirmation for which Stothard was looking. The decision was taken to repeat the feat throughout the country.

Thus within days of Stothard’s corridor chat, a great strategic gamble was being swung into action, backed by a strongly supportive Murdoch and his son-in-law, Alasdair MacLeod, who was The Times’s circulation manager and perhaps the single greatest exponent behind the plan. Here was an example of where having the backing of a strong and risk-taking proprietor who was prepared to back his instincts with decisive action in the face of hostile conventional wisdom proved beneficial. It allowed a newspaper to pursue a strategy that would probably not have been open to it if it had been run by a conventional company owned by banks or private investment trusts used to managing though the usual risk-analysis assessments. The daring of the approach was shown by the incredulity of the media analysts. When the news broke that The Times was going to cut fifteen pence from its price nationally, the initial industry reaction, as reported by the perceptive Raymond Snoddy in the FT, was that Stothard and Murdoch ‘must have gone mad’.[9] Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian’s deputy editor, made clear his paper would not be following suit. ‘Unlike the Sun and The Times,’ Rusbridger sniffed, ‘the Guardian has no problem in attracting readers prepared to pay what they evidently think is a reasonable cover price.’[10] The Telegraph was equally snippy, its managing director stating, ‘We think it’s sad to see a British institution in such an undignified state, marketing itself not as a paper of record, not for its wide coverage or fine writing, not even for its integrity but “Buy Me, I’m Cheap”.’[11] Some of this was the natural badinage of competitors, but for the most part the tone of dismissive condescension was genuine.

A less sanguine attitude animated the Independent. When the news broke that The Times was dropping its price, the Independent took the controversial step of issuing a front-page condemnation. It accused Murdoch of a ‘cynical’ predatory pricing policy that was deliberately seeking to ‘drive this newspaper, The Independent, and The Independent on Sunday out of business’. ‘Without any new editorial ideas’, the statement continued, ‘and without any belief in The Times as a newspaper, Murdoch has decided to crush his nearest rival with the power of money.’ The Independent, it made clear, would not be prepared to enter this price-cutting war: ‘Unlike the Times, The Independent has to earn its living in the world. Because it has to, it has a genuinely independent liberal voice, something which The Times lost the moment Mr Murdoch became its owner.’[12] Three days after The Times’s price cut went nationwide, Newspaper Publishing, the Independent’s owners, delivered a submission to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) alleging Murdoch was improperly trying to destroy their business by using the profits from other divisions of his empire to give his (loss-making) Times an unfair advantage against its competitors. The assumption was that, once he had achieved his goal of removing the Independent as a competitor, he would then increase the cover price and maximize his profits. This operated against competition law and the ultimate losers would be the newspaper-reading public.

These were strong allegations and difficult to prove. The law defined predatory pricing as the attempt by a company that had a ‘dominant’ position in its market to set its price with the intention of destroying its competition. Yet, not only was The Times’s share of the broadsheet market very much a minority one, even if Murdoch’s other mass-selling tabloids were included in a survey of the total market, the company still had a minority share. Only in satellite broadcasting did Murdoch’s Sky enjoy a dominant position and he maintained that the money to fund The Times’s price cut did not come from that sector of his empire. This was not the only problem facing those trying to use the law to block the price cut. Investigations by the Office of Fair Trading could not be concluded quickly and indeed it was necessary that there should not be a recourse that allowed any company immediately to halt a competitor offering an alternative product more cheaply. The problem for Murdoch’s accusers was that by the time a predatory pricing policy was shown to have succeeded in its aims, it could be too late to do much about it. Since the introduction of the 1980 Competition Act, the OFT had only undertaken seven formal investigations and five times come to the conclusion that no offence existed. There had never previously been a complaint regarding newspaper pricing.

Murdoch found the Independent’s accusations highly hypocritical. ‘I think it’s a bit rich of Andreas Whittam Smith,’ he shot back, ‘particularly when he was only able to launch his paper because of what we did at Wapping. He also closed the Sunday Correspondent and tried to do the same to The Observer.’[13] Whittam Smith’s moral high ground had indeed been undermined by his own actions. He had deliberately launched the Independent on Sunday in order to destroy the new Sunday Correspondent, duly forcing it to fold. In trying (and failing) to buy the Observer, he had fuelled speculation that the only reason he wanted to own directly competing Sunday newspapers was in order to strangle the two-hundred-year-old Observer so that his own sickly infant could survive. ‘I wasn’t going to be lectured by them,’ fumed Stothard, accusing Whittam Smith of talking ‘the most sanctimonious nonsense. The only clear, unequivocal case of a paper doing something to close another paper down was the launch of the Independent of Sunday in order to close The Correspondent.’ By contrast, Murdoch had a reputation for investment rather than closure. He had saved Today from the scrapheap and was only eventually persuaded to terminate its life when, having spent millions, it proved impossible to turn around. Indeed, as far as Stothard’s analysis was concerned, the complaints against The Times had come a bit late: ‘the time that we were really predatory pricing was when The Times was racking up massive losses’. Neither Northcliffe, nor the Astors, nor the Thomsons had sold the paper at its true cover price, being prepared instead to subsidize its losses from money they had made elsewhere. ‘Did anybody complain when the owners of The Times were pumping millions of pounds into saving The Times from a fate at the hands of the market?’ asked Stothard rhetorically. On this reading of the evidence, ‘we had been predatory pricing for a hundred years’ without complaint. Stothard suspected that what the critics now ‘objected to was the success of the paper and its attraction to their readers. I found these arguments hypocritical.’[14]

The thirty-pence Times was launched on 6 September 1993. By the end of the week, sales had gone up by more than a quarter. It was in that same week that Murdoch announced the expansion of BSkyB with an eighteen-channel package that doubled the number of satellite channels available in Britain. He had also acquired the Star TV satellite in Asia which was technically accessible to two-thirds of the continent’s population. To those who had long looked at Murdoch’s rise with feelings of dread, he appeared to be launching assaults on all fronts in a battle for global media domination. One of those particularly horrified that Murdoch appeared to be taking over the world, one satellite dish at a time, was Ann Clwyd, Labour’s heritage spokeswoman, who declared The Times’s decision to cut its price ‘an affront to democracy’ and urged an investigation by the Monopolies Commission to prevent ‘this degree of influence in Britain’s press and broadcasting’. It was not just Labour politicians who were alarmed. Peter Bottomley, the deputy chairman of the Conservative Backbench Media Committee, also expressed concern.[15]

Where were Murdoch’s guns actually pointing? The Daily Mail and the Daily Express had just increased their cover price when The Times launched its offensive and it was from the mid-market, rather than the broadsheet competition, that the most immediate gains appeared to be made. Murdoch’s initial approach to Paul Dacre the previous year with the offer of The Times editorship certainly suggested that he had his sites on attracting middle-market readers to the more venerable title. Yet it was not just a question of coaxing readers away from other papers. Attracting those who had ceased buying any newspaper was a major contributing factor to The Times’s dramatic rise. The emphasis on investing in the quality of the product had, it seemed, blinded newspaper executives to the price sensitivity of the market. Broadsheet readers were just as keen on saving pennies as tabloid browsers. This explained why The Times was able to stretch its lead over the Independent by 110,000 and by almost 40,000 over the Guardian even though the latter’s circulation statistics remained buoyant. During October, there were 100,000 more copies of national broadsheet newspapers being bought every day than there had been in August. Far from seeking to wipe out all signs of competition, The Times, it seemed, was helping to grow a market that had appeared in gradual decline. This was a repeat of what the Independent had successfully done upon its launch in 1986.

In the first months, neither the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian nor the FT suffered greatly from the launch of the cut-price Times. The only significant losers were the Independent, which was down 20 per cent, and the mid-market Daily Express, down 9 per cent. The Telegraph’s sales remained surprisingly stable, averaging just over one million.[16] The Independent’s attempted fightback in October 1993 with a new-look two sections with colour printing failed to reverse its slide. The price war had come at a moment when the Independent was in crisis, its finances drained by the launch of the Independent on Sunday. Andreas Whittam Smith, who at one stage had been sufficiently confident to muse that the Independent might buy The Times, was forced to go cap in hand to Mirror Group Newspapers. Although he remained editor and chairman of the new board, the paper was independent in name only since its fortunes were now at the mercy of the owners of the Daily Mirror (whose sales were taking a pounding from the cut-price Sun) and backed up by significant shareholdings from El Pais and La Repubblica. It was not the sort of proprietorial commune the Independent’s founders had envisaged. Nonetheless, the new arrangement was a lifeline, bringing the investment the paper need. What it had lost, besides its innocence, was its sense of momentum, a force which only months earlier had looked like elevating it above The Times. In February 1994 the Independent’s sales fell below those of the supposedly niche-market FT. By then it was trailing The Times by 175,000. The tables had been most effectively turned.

The Daily Telegraph had reacted to the price cut of its principal rival with a degree of sang froid bordering on complacency. With a forecast £60 million profit for 1993 its position at the head of the broadsheet market doubtless appeared unassailable. Its managing director had even argued its rising cover price was an asset on the grounds that it was ‘a premium price for a premium brand’. In fact, the Telegraph’s half-century domination of the broadsheet market rested on exactly the sort of tactic Murdoch was now pursuing. In 1930, the Telegraph had halved its price from twopence to a penny. Its sales soared past the million mark leaving behind The Times to cater for its small, if influential, metropolitan catchment area. It had taken a long time for The Times to catch on. The Telegraph’s problem – whatever the talk of ‘premium brands’ – was that in the space of the past eight years it had gone from being the cheapest national broadsheet to the most expensive of the four (the FT, retailing at sixty-five pence, cost more, but it catered for a targeted market). The Telegraph’s initial ability to withstand the price assault bolstered the arguments of those in its ranks who believed there was no need to panic. Of Murdoch’s efforts, Neil Collins took the view, ‘there must be something better you can do with £40 million than hand it to your customers’. But by June 1994, after nine months of withstanding the assault, it was clear to those assembled at the Telegraph’s offices in Canary Wharf that their paper’s sales were starting to slide and that delaying matters could be catastrophic. Retailing at eighteen pence more than its direct rival, the Telegraph risked pricing itself out of the market. They persuaded Conrad Black to cut the price.[17]

On the evening of the Telegraph’s price cutting announcement, Stothard was at a party thrown by the publisher Lord Weidenfeld when Black, looking gruff, came up to him. ‘What you and Rupert Murdoch don’t understand,’ he warned, ‘is just how rich I am.’ To Stothard these sounded like the words of a man who was not quite as rich as he would like to be.[18] Black’s patience and his pockets did transpire to be limited. The Telegraph’s cut in price attracted back lost readers but provoked a far more negative response from the City where its share price dived from 540 pence to 349 pence, wiping £264 million from its market capitalization. The crash also put the spotlight on Conrad Black who had raised £73 million by selling shares at 587 pence only the previous month while sticking to the line that the Telegraph would not enter the price war. Feeling misled, financiers were furious at his volte-face and he suffered the indignity of having Cazenove, his corporate stockbroker, state they were terminating their relationship with the Telegraph Group. Max Hastings would later write in defence of Black’s claim that the had not consciously deceived investors[19] and the Stock Exchange also cleared him of impropriety. Nevertheless, the affair damaged Black’s reputation in the City. Critics were quick to dredge the episode back up when, in 2004, his business affairs came unstuck.

In June 1994, Black may have hoped that sanctioning a price cut would bring The Times’s offensive to a halt. He was wrong. Stothard and Murdoch immediately agreed to meet fire with fire. Thus The Times responded by cutting again, taking the cover price down to twenty pence and immediately wrong-footing the Telegraph. Between them, Hollinger and News International were writing off around £80 million in lost revenue from circulation. Many in the City believed it was madness. The Times now cost the same as the Sun. ‘I am watching with the bemusement that I sometimes reserve for a bad pantomine,’ commented Peter Preston, the Guardian’s Editor.[20] The Independent, having taken the most high-minded line of all, dipped its toe in the water with a one-off twenty-pence edition on Monday 23 June. It boosted sales on the day, but few were so impressed that they came back for more at full price the following morning. Black, meanwhile, made informal approaches to Murdoch to call the price war off.[21] The moves were rebuffed. Regardless of how rich Black claimed to be, the evidence was that Murdoch was richer. While the £45 million cost of the price war reduced News International’s operating profits to £96.2 million in the year to June 1994, this was more than balanced by the surging profitability of BSkyB and News Corp.’s television and film divisions in the United States.[22] Over the summer of 1994, The Times felt sufficiently confident to increase its advertising rates by 15 per cent, a decision that reflected the extent to which gaining sales was also making it a more desirable vehicle for advertisers. Year on year, The Times’s circulation was up 40 per cent in the first six months of 1994.

The attempts of competitors to prevent the price war continuing was dealt successive blows in 1993 and 1994 when the OFT reported that there was no evidence of predatory pricing. Nonetheless, while The Times’s sale continued to soar, there were casualties at Wapping. Andrew Knight continued as News International’s chairman, but the executive powers of the post had passed to August (‘Gus’) Fischer. The Swiss-born Fischer was far more of a technocrat than the urbane, editorially minded Knight, whose social and political contacts nonetheless continued to make him a formidable defender of the company’s interests against further regulation. John Dux, an energetic Australian and former editor of the South China Morning Post, continued as managing director until March 1995 when a crisis over the short supply (and correspondingly high price) of newsprint reached such severity that it forced the newspapers to temporarily cut pagination. Voices were raised that the shortages should have been foreseen and better planned around. The crisis precipitated Dux’s replacement by his compatriot David Flynn. Gus Fischer also fell by the wayside. Bill O’Neill momentarily stepped back in as Murdoch’s eternally safe pair of hands before Les Hinton was appointed executive chairman later in the year. He proved a remarkably stabilizing influence on the Wapping atmosphere.

Ignoring the impressions of those such as Stephen Glover who wrote that, ‘Even in this free-market age there is something undignified about The Times, of all papers, desperately marketing itself as though it were a soap powder’,[23] Stothard was buoyed up by the evidence that once the paper got into readers’ hands they were impressed by the product. ‘We were in a risk-taking mode,’ he later confided. When it was suggested to him that for one day only The Times could be offered free in a deal sponsored by Microsoft, he agreed to it. There appeared not to be a conflict of interest since Microsoft would have no editorial say in the content. Instead, the computer software company would merely underwrite the sales’ cost in return for the advertising gains of being seen as the paper’s sponsor. The free paper duly appeared on 24 August 1995 with a supplement attached advertising Microsoft’s new Windows 95 software. A giant print run of 1.5 million was produced to anticipate the inevitable demand the offer of the free paper would create. Circulation was up 8 per cent in the days following the free issue and was still 3 per cent up by the end of the month. ‘I think we probably did get something out of it because we could show the paper to a lot more people,’ Stothard reflected, before adding, ‘would I have done it again? No.’[24] In terms of boosting sales without the cost of promotion, it was a cheap and easy success. Yet it was a mistake insofar as it risked The Times’s reputation. It had become, even if only for one day, a ‘give-away’ product. This tarnished the brand name for quality. Furthermore, despite the avowal that Microsoft had been rewarded with no say in what was printed in the paper, it allowed detractors to suggest that editorial integrity might nonetheless be strained by reliance on the benevolence of a single company. Although this did not happen in practice, it was certainly a most unfortunate possibility in theory. The deal certainly appeared to make commercial sense for Microsoft. Media Week magazine reflected that it was ‘widely regarded as the most magnificent media coup in recent memory’. Others were sniffy. ‘Worth every penny – Times for free,’ jibed a headline in the Guardian.[25]

In November 1995, with circulation approaching 700,000 – double what it had been when the price war had begun just twenty-five months earlier – the decision was taken to raise The Times’s price to thirty-five pence. The Telegraph promptly upped its cover price to forty pence. Yet this was not a sign that Murdoch was preparing to call off the assault. In June 1996, The Times slashed its Monday cover price to ten pence. The intention here was to attract a new market for the paper’s revamped sports coverage, which had been invested heavily in and was, at last, ready to take on the Telegraph at its strongest point. As a means of attracting new readers, the ten-pence offer was a resounding success. Sales on Mondays soared to 1.2 million, while the paper was selling in excess of 700,000 on the other weekdays. Yet the numbers buying on the Monday and then becoming new, regular readers for the rest of the week were not of a scale to suggest that the price war could bring benefits indefinitely. Not prepared to wait, The Times’s competitors launched a fresh appeal to the Office of Fair Trading. There were two principal allegations. They argued that by continuing the price war into a fourth year, the tactic could no longer be defended as being merely a typical promotion exercise and that the ten-pence Monday edition must surely constitute selling the paper at a loss. The critics’ case was strengthened by rumours that the Independent was about to fold. Having started the loss-making Independent on Sunday, the paper’s financial difficulties were not, of course, purely the fault of Rupert Murdoch, but the prospect of the paper’s death was held up as evidence that The Times’s price cut was destroying competition. In the House of Lords, a cross-party group led by Lord McNally, a Liberal Democrat peer, attempted to ride to the rescue. The Government was proposing new legislation that intended to harmonize British law with the principals of European law. The peers voted by 121 to 93 to amend the Competition Bill in a way that, they hoped, would make price wars like that being waged by The Times illegal. Among those voting with the Liberal Democrats were twenty-three Labour peers in defiance of their party whip.

The argument made by McNally dovetailed with that put forward by the Independent, that ‘the media is a special case in competition law’.[26] The Government took the contrary view with Margaret Beckett, the President of the Board of Trade, maintaining that the McNally proposal was ‘unworkable in law and practice’. The amendment had attempted to prohibit any price cut that intended to ‘injure or eliminate’ competition. A law that prevented a company pursuing a business strategy that injured its rivals was not a recipe for innovation in the newspaper market or good value for the customer. The amendment was duly removed from the bill during its committee stage in June 1998. The following May, John Bridgeman, the OFT’s director-general issued what was the fourth report into The Times’s pricing policy. The ten-pence paper on Monday was criticized (although the price had subsequently been increased to twenty pence in January 1998) but once again the complaints that the paper had been engaged in predatory pricing with the explicit intent of eliminating a competitor were rejected.[27]

By then, it had become clear that The Times was not going to overtake the Telegraph, encouraging some to believe that the latter, in remaining the best-selling daily broadsheet, was winning the war. It was a sign of The Times’s success that an offensive commenced amid derisive comments that it would make little headway ended up being questioned because it had not left its opponent for dead. In this sense, it had altered the perspectives on what was possible. By 1997, The Times had doubled its circulation while the Telegraph had only kept its head above the one million mark by means that went beyond lowering the cover price. It invested in a vast subscription scheme to try and lock in 300,000 readers at a cut-price rate. This was hugely costly to the Telegraph, whose profits had fallen from around £60 million in 1993 to £1 million by 1996.[28] On the newsstands, it was The Times that was making the advances as was clear by the fact that it was selling almost as many copies a day at the full cover price as was the Telegraph. This was an extraordinary turnaround.

No treaty or proclamation marked the price war’s end. The cover price simply went up in five-pence hikes. Given the turn-of-the-century collapse in revenue because of the advertising recession, the need to claw back some revenue from cover-price sales became inevitable. Nonetheless, it was not until the autumn of 2002 that The Times was retailing at the forty-five-pence rate at which it had been priced on the eve of the great gamble nine years earlier. By 2002, circulation had fallen back but remained above 600,000. It had been selling only 354,000 copies when it last sold for forty-five pence. During the intervening period a vast new readership, dwarfing anything the paper had ever attracted in the past, had been enticed by a low price to try it out. The triumph of Stothard’s Times was not that people bought it because it was cheap but that so many opted to stay with it when the price went back up.

III

Dangerously, The Times had begun its great push for new readers before it had sorted out the problems on the backbench that had beset Simon Jenkins’s editorship. Nonetheless, changes began to be made that effectively addressed the problem. Tim Austin was appointed chief revise editor. As such, he very successfully eradicated the misspellings, inconsistent punctuation and general lapses from perfection that had riled Jenkins, while making his corrections without the same amount of drama. Most importantly of all, Andrew Knight suggested to Stothard that he might be able to lure David Ruddock over from the Telegraph as night editor. Taking up his new position in 1994, Ruddock was a no-nonsense professional whose style of enlightened despotism on the Telegraph’s backbench had been a central component to that paper’s success. Recognizing a man searching for a new challenge, Knight hoped Ruddock would perform the same task at The Times.

Ruddock got to work with relish, gaining the ear of Peter Roberts, the managing editor, to ring the changes. The four-day week enjoyed by subeditors working late nights was abolished, reducing the amount of work done by ‘casuals’. The computer system was modified to allow the editor to read copy prior to its being made available on the page. It was a privilege his opposite number at the Telegraph had long enjoyed. ‘It’s the first time I’ve been able to read what’s going on’ a delighted Stothard told his new night editor. Smoking was abolished in The Times building. This made a significant change to the work environment. The rum warehouse was a long, open-plan shed with few windows (none of which opened anyway) but, worst of all, it had poor air conditioning. For the past eight years its inmates had been cooped up inside within a blue haze of smoke. The decision soon came to be seen as an improvement.

There were further staff changes, among them Tom Pride, who was brought in as a copy taster, and Simon Pearson – whose talent Ruddock early identified as making him a worthy successor when the time came – moved from the foreign subs desk to the position of home chief Sub. Away from the paper, Ruddock was an outspoken and hospitable man with a particular interest in the Peninsular War. From his command point on the backbench, he led by example, working tirelessly from 1 p.m. to 1 a.m., encouraging and exhorting the troops around him for another attack. On one memorable occasion he told the home news editor, James MacManus – a patrician figure not easily cast for a life in domestic service – that he was the waiter and that he, Ruddock, required a menu each night from which he might choose what to put into the paper. This was not how MacManus had seen the relationship. There was no shortage of plats du jour but Ruddock generally had a clear idea of what was to his taste and what was not. He inherited a paper that ran six different editions every night. Each edition saw a refining of the copy that had appeared in its predecessor, with reactions to breaking news (and a chance to snoop on what was in the first editions of the rival newspapers) as well as tailoring content to the area the edition was being sent to (more Scottish news in the edition that went north of the border, more West Country news for the edition that was despatched there, and so on).

Stothard took a great interest in the features, the leaders and the main decisions about what was going to be in the following day’s newspaper. He usually left the office after the first edition was completed at 8 p.m. He was content to leave John Bryant and David Ruddock to take decisions about breaking news developments as they came in during the night. News that had important political implications for its treatment was a different matter. Nonetheless, at some stage on most nights Stothard would be telephoned for his deliberation on a specific matter than had arisen. Generally, he knew that Bryant and Ruddock were more than capable of handling matters as they arose. It was an understanding that allowed Stothard to adopt a far less interventionist approach to the wording of the news pages than, for instance, Simon Jenkins, had felt at ease to permit. Stothard was also spared the burden of having to shoulder managerial problems by Peter Roberts who Jenkins had appointed managing editor. Roberts continued to oversee the budgetary, contractual and personnel issues even though he was dying of cancer. Despite increasing pain, he carried on until September 1996, dying the following year aged sixty-two. In his place, James MacManus picked up the baton. The price war and the paper’s expansion were exciting times in which to be in command of resources and MacManus threw himself into the task with customary flair. When he subsequently moved over to direct the Times supplements’ operations, Stothard’s friend and colleague George Brock took charge. It proved another successful relationship.

Thanks to the improving economic situation, these were good years in which to be managing editor. The prospectus provided by Dick Linford, News International’s chief financial officer, proffered opportunities for growth. At its commencement in 1993, the price war had seriously dented The Times’s finances. Circulation soared but not the revenue to accompany it because the cover price had been discounted so heavily. Consequently, circulation revenue had halved by 1995. This was a tactical retreat that made possible the strategic advance when new readers continued to stick with the paper after its cover price edged back up. By 1997, with the cover price hiked to 35 pence, circulation revenue was 20 per cent higher than its level at the end of 1993. Even more importantly, advertising revenue increased by 139 per cent over this period as a direct result of the 106 per cent increase in circulation. This was dramatic. Advertising, which had generated half of The Times’s revenue in 1993, was, by 1997, contributing two-thirds of the paper’s income. What had been lost in cover price discounts had more than been made up in ad sales. By 1997, The Times’s losses were less serious than before the price war began. Although still not profitable, the paper’s finances continued to improve thereafter and by 2000, advertising had risen again and was accounting for 70 per cent of revenue. The Sunday Times, meanwhile, was recording healthy returns that ensured that Times Newspapers Limited posted a £22 million profit that year. This was to be the high point, for the arrival of the new millennium was followed by a major slump in advertising that hurt media empires throughout the western world and Wapping found itself, once again, with its hatches battened down. For the most part, though, The Times spent the last years of the twentieth century with far more financial room to manoeuvre than it had enjoyed for any prolonged period in the previous hundred years.

IV

The price cut changed the content of The Times less than might have been imagined. Rather, Stothard had set most of the changes in motion before the great bid to increase its market share had got underway. It was these changes that made it a more attractive read for those cajoled into trying it by its sudden cheapness.

Features and columnists were among the principal means through which readers developed what they imagined was almost a personal rapport with their paper’s journalists. This bond was at its strongest on Saturdays. Two columnists in particular succeeded in generating a loyal following. One was John Diamond. His column ran for nine years in The Times Magazine. His work, which had generally been light-hearted in tone, took on a new profundity in March 1997 when he was diagnosed with throat cancer. For such a naturally gregarious man, it was a particularly cruel assault. As the cancer gradually took hold, robbing him of his voice, his column became his means of expression. Relaying his treatment and facing up to the prospect of death, Diamond retained a sense of self-deprecation that gained him the admiration of readers and colleagues alike. The column was not merely his personal therapy; it served to give hope and understanding to thousands of people facing personal hurdles of their own. By the time of his death in 2001, aged forty-seven, readers were writing to him in extraordinary numbers. Another journalist who developed a particular rapport with readers was John Morgan. Between 1997 and 2000, the dapper boulevardier offered advice on modern manners on the back page of the weekend section of the paper. His achievement was his ability to be amusing and approachable while offering sound recommendations that were never stuffy and rarely antiquated in tone. This was central to the column’s success since many of those writing fell into one of two categories. Those from more traditional backgrounds felt insecure about what was correct behaviour in the baffling environment of contemporary Britain where the breaking down of barriers had brought confusion about appropriate conduct. Others, products of post-sixties modernity, wanted guidance on how to behave in a more dignified – but non-snobbish – way. Themes ranged from how to open automatic doors for women, whether breast-feeding was acceptable in public and whether those who ate and drank less than their companions in a restaurant should complain if the bill was split equally. Morgan wrote with self-assurance but never arrogance while guiding readers through the social minefield of how to avoid causing unnecessary offence to other people. Growing up in Perth, he had acquired metropolitan sophistication rather than having been born into it. He died in July 2000, aged forty-one, after falling from a window in his small (but elegantly appointed) third-floor bachelor set in Albany, off Piccadilly. A generous host and lavish spender, he had become increasingly worried about his financial situation. Friends, however, believed he would have chosen a more dignified means of exit. A coroner’s court inquest returned an open verdict. The Times was inundated with letters from readers conveying their sympathy and sadness at his loss.

In other areas the paper continued to build on its foundations. Tom Clarke had transformed the paper’s sports coverage but Stothard, who was able to disengage his own disinterest from sporting endeavour from his recognition that it should be given an even higher profile, decided he wanted a change of personnel. In Clarke’s place, David Chappell, supported by Keith Blackmore as his deputy, was entrusted with the sports section. Defeating the Telegraph at the game it played best would not be easy, for, as Stothard conceded, ‘Male sports enthusiasts are one of the most conservative groups in terms of trying to get them to switch and get hooked on a new paper.’[29] The brief period in which The Times sold for ten pence on a Monday was specifically designed to maximize the audience for The Times’s improved sports coverage. Slowly, The Times’s score incremented, although at a Boycott rather than a Botham run rate.

Certainly, the England cricket team could have done with either player in their prime. For a while it looked as if the country’s saviour would come from abroad. In May 1988, Worcestershire’s twenty-one-year-old Zimbabwean-born batsman, Graeme Hick, made light of a slow outfield to score 405 not out, the highest first-class score made in England in the twentieth century. Hick would be available to play for England from 1991 and great things were expected. In the event, great things were nearly achieved. He emerged to become one of England’s finest county batsmen, ranking among the ten highest run makers in the game, but he never quite achieved greatness for his adopted country at Test level. Marcus Williams filed from around the county grounds and, later, as sports editor, proved to be in both longevity and experience the backbone of the paper’s sports desk. When he had arrived at the paper in 1980, the Telegraph reported from all the first-class county matches while The Times contented itself with reports from four or five during the season. Under Williams, the paper made good this shortcoming and followed its rival’s lead in covering all the matches.

Having reported Test matches for The Times since 1954, John Woodcock had (alongside Richie Benaud) a reasonable claim to having watched more Test match cricket than any other man in history. In 1987 he finally relinquished his place as chief correspondent, although since he was still writing more occasional cricket commentary for the paper into the twenty-first century it was perhaps a matter of his merely dropping down the batting order. There was much that still enthralled him about the game although he was no fan of some of the innovations – the ‘pyjama games’ and overindulgence of one-day matches and anything that could be ascribed to the influence of Kerry Packer. When allegations were made that Ian Botham had taken drugs, Woodcock turned with a sigh to John Goodbody and asked, ‘Dear boy, where will it end?’ Goodbody looked back at the friendly and sagacious face and retorted with resigned worldliness, ‘I think, on the front page.’[30]

The arrival of Michael Atherton as England’s captain appeared to offer hope. Circumstances, however, were against him. He came to the helm midway through the losing Ashes series of 1993. The following April, the Trinidadian Brian Lara, aged twenty-four, beat Garfield Sobers’s thirty-six-year record Test score of 365 (not out) by scoring 375 against England in Antigua, watched by Alan Lee, by then The Times’s cricket correspondent. When Atherton resigned after losing a close series to the West Indies in 1998, the statistics looked poor, but he proved to be England’s longest-serving captain and was the catalyst for the positive changes gradually ushered in after 1999 by Nasser Hussain and the coach, Duncan Fletcher. In good time for this late English renaissance, Christopher Martin-Jenkins joined The Times as its chief cricket correspondent in 1999 after eight distinguished years reporting from the boundary for the Telegraph. One of the most respected voices in the game – his calm, analytical summaries continued to be heard on the radio’s Test Match Special – his move to The Times reinforced the extent to which it had closed the gap with the Telegraph in the battle for providing the best sports coverage.

At Wapping, the sports desk consisted largely of subs hammering and moulding the constant flow of dispatches from the field reporters into their allotted space. John Goodbody, one of the prolific sports writers who did report for daily duty at Wapping, spent most of his working day on the news rather than the sports desk. Not all sports reporters resembled in appearance the fit athletic specimens it was their calling to write about, but Goodbody was one whose sporting days were not confined to the dim and selectively remembered past. His form was certainly impressive. He had broken British junior weightlifting records and was a member of Britain’s national judo squad in 1970 before going up four years later as a mature student to Trinity College, Cambridge. There, he became the university’s leading shot putter. A month after he won his Blue he was displaying the multi-tasking skills that would serve him well in his subsequent career. He spent the morning of his part one English Tripos exam answering questions on Henry James and D. H. Lawrence before speeding over to the Crystal Palace trackside for an afternoon at the Olympic athletics trials deconstructing Brendan Foster and Geoff Capes for the benefit of Sunday Mirror readers. Having joined The Times shortly before the move to Wapping, he continued to cut a toned figure, happily thriving on five hours sleep a night. In August 1991, at the age of forty-eight, his first attempt to swim the English Channel ended three miles from the French coast when he had to be pulled from the water, semi-conscious and suffering from hypothermia. He concluded that the wrong grease and training forty to fifty hours a week in cold water had made him lose too much useful body fat. Undaunted, he tried again and fourteen days later became the oldest Briton for twelve years to achieve the crossing. Simon Jenkins, then editing the paper, was so impressed that he persuaded Goodbody to write a report of his account for the front page.[31]

An audit of which sporting figure’s picture appeared most frequently in The Times during the late 1990s revealed that one player was far ahead of his field. This was Tim Henman. Most major sports produced a range of stars and superstars but if any one of them failed to be man of the match there was always another team member to be immortalized scoring the goal or flashing the cricket bat. For many Britons, however, Tim Henman was the face of tennis, or at any rate that of the annual Wimbledon championships that in Britain commanded greater interest than the three other Open tournaments put together. Rex Bellamy having retired from the reporters’ vantage point on Centre Court, it fell to tennis correspondents Julian Muscat and Alix Ramsay to have the pleasure, or mental ordeal, of reporting on Tim Henman’s various attempts to win Wimbledon. The prospect first became a serious possibility when he reached the semi-final in 1998, blocked from becoming the first Briton to make the final since 1938 only by Pete Sampras, the greatest tennis player of the decade and, perhaps, of all time. Henman’s struggles as the nearly man of SW19 – he reached the semi-finals four times in five years between 1998 and 2002 – carrying the fevered hopes of millions of otherwise unhysterical middleclass Britons on his shoulders, was the psychological human drama that always brought out the best in Simon Barnes’s journalism.

During the 1990s, the progress of both Murdoch’s BSkyB satellite television and football went hand in hand. Winning coverage rights to Premiership games helped transform Sky’s fortunes. The previous decade had been a low point for the sport, albeit as much for the hooliganism and general unpleasantness that took place off the pitch as for the quality of play on it. The yobbery of Liverpool supporters had caused the death of Juventus fans at the Heysel Stadium, provoking a sense of national shame and ensuring the banning of English clubs from European championships. In 1988 the Government seriously considered forcing all football supporters to be registered and presented with identity cards so that troublemakers could be more easily prevented from attending matches. Tragedy had stalked the grandstand at Bradford City, which became an inferno, and the terraces of Hillsborough where ninety-six Liverpool fans were crushed to death. Established in the Hillsborough tragedy’s aftermath, the Taylor Report’s recommendations were enacted, forcing league grounds to become all-seater venues and to carry out improvements that made match attendance less of a threatening experience. At the time, many clubs, dependent on gate receipts, questioned how they could afford the expense of the change and the reduced number of paying supporters they would subsequently be able to squeeze through the turnstile. The Government even felt compelled to announce it would divert funds from the betting tax to support the upgraded facilities. In fact, far from hurting the clubs’ finances, the improvements came just in time to take advantage of the sport’s economic renaissance. In 1992, the Premier League was created. Murdoch’s decision to buy the broadcasting rights for Sky transformed the sport. Suddenly, the leading teams were able to benefit from a huge cash injection, the sums from Sky being supplemented by the greatly enhanced opportunities for sponsorship as other companies raced to gain from the exposure. The growth could be seen clearly enough through the increasing sums clubs were prepared to pay for players. In July 1988, Tottenham Hotspur had provoked gasps by purchasing Paul Gascoigne for a record fee of £2 million. A decade later, Alan Shearer cost Newcastle United £15 million with Shearer receiving a £500,000 signing-on fee and a guaranteed annual salary of £1.5 million for five years. The Premiership’s principal clubs spent £68 million on new signings in 1995 and the figure had passed £100 million two years later. Some maintained that this revolution came at the expense of the less successful clubs. Others argued that far from extinguishing the non-Premiership teams, the Sky deal helped grow the market. With greater variation in kick-off times and the spread of matches to Sundays, supporters found their viewing choices – on the screen as well as at the ground – widened.

The process was mutually beneficial. The broadcasting deal rescued Sky’s previously perilous bank balance. Murdoch’s commercial interest in the people’s game appeared to approach new heights when in 1999 he made a bid for Manchester United. The deal was blocked by the Government but, by then, the proprietor’s business interest in the sport had already manifested profound repercussions for The Times. Although there was never any tie-in between the newspaper and Sky, Murdoch’s experience of watching the expanding market for football coverage had made him conscious that it was a growth area from which even the most elevated sections of his media empire could benefit. During the spring of 1996, Murdoch paid a visit to The Times and asked which big events were coming up. Various forthcoming attractions were mentioned but those that prompted the proprietor’s interest fell into one category which he summed up in the phrase – later adopted in the paper and elsewhere – ‘the great summer of sport’. Without pausing to digest what had been said, Murdoch made clear that funds would be made available for a massive expansion of The Times’s sports section.[32] At its heart was Euro ’96 – the European football championships – to be hosted by England in June. With Murdoch’s encouragement, the paper would now be able to provide a far higher level of in-depth coverage than it had accorded any previous soccer tournament. Through Sky, he had learned how well football sold and was sure that The Times could not afford to miss this extraordinary growth market. This proved a defining moment in the development of the paper. The football coverage shot up from four to nine pages. The expansion was well timed: Euro ‘96 proved a turning point in the fortunes of football in Britain. There was little sign during the tournament of the unappealing sideshows of hooliganism and bad sportsmanship that had previously tarnished the sport’s image. Instead, it proved a tremendous spectacle of the British summer. The Times rose to the moment with Rob Hughes, its football correspondent, ably supported by a team that featured the man-marking skills of Oliver Holt, Alyson Rudd and David Maddock. By the time England were defeated in a penalty shoot-out in a thrilling semi-final by the eventual champions, Germany, the country had – in the parlance of the moment – ‘gone footie mad’.

The legacy was a noticeable upsurge in interest in the game even from among those who might previously have imagined logging a 4–4–2 formation was something to do with train spotting. Bankers and accountants crammed into pubs to watch the match, rubbing shoulders with the sport’s less fair-weather devotees. Even ascending a couple of floors in the office lift the next morning would be treated as a sufficient moment to impart some second-hand observation about the match and, for this, the broadsheets provided their fair share of primary information. The high level of interest in The Times’s coverage certainly suggested soccer was becoming gentrified and was even a suitable subject for front-page photography. In this respect David Beckham, a player in danger of being recognized as a celebrity in his own right, became the pin-up of tabloids and broadsheets alike. With money, glamour and excitement all coming together, it was noticeable that football was finally beginning to interest large numbers of women too. This was a change The Times was quick to discern. In the past, the concept of the female sports’ journalist was poorly grasped. There were rare exceptions, especially in sports with a strong female following like show jumping: after fifteen years as equestrian correspondent, Pamela Macgregor-Morris passed over to Jenny MacArthur in 1983. During the mid-nineties, though – and accentuated by the popular reaction to Euro ’96 – the paper turned to journalists like Alison Kervin and Alyson Rudd not only to report on matches but also to become columnists and pundits. Rudd and Lynne Truss, whose ‘Kicking and Screaming’ column began during the European championship, lifted the lid off the lad culture of soccer. Kervin became an interviewer as well as a reporter, sports coverage having become almost as much about previewing events and analysing the chief protagonists as about filing match reports. The Times invested not just in women writing about men’s sport but also about their own. Sarah Potter, a specialist on women’s cricket, reported extensively on women in all walks of sport.

In any contest between the football World Cup and the Olympic Games, Simon Barnes was of the opinion that the latter remained the greatest show on earth. For all its passion and drama, he found ‘the monoculture of football dispiriting’. Its commercialism only inflated its sense of self-importance and covering the World Cup often involved observing a succession of similar narratives. In contrast, he believed that ‘the Olympics represent the search for greatness in such a variety of forms’, adding, ‘and with twice the number of sexes’.[33] Throughout these years – far removed from the overt idolatry, huge salaries and satellite television coverage that was transforming football – the rower Steve Redgrave was winning Olympic gold. At the Atlanta Games in 1996 his performance with Matthew Pinsent in a coxless pair proved to be the only gold medal Britain gained in any discipline in what was, in all other respects, a dismal display of the nation’s sporting prowess that left Great Britain on a par with Burundi and Ecuador. Some blamed the poor performance on Britain’s seemingly insatiable obsession with football to the exclusion of other sports. Others blamed the lack of funding available for those other sports – although the two points were not mutually exclusive. The sale of school playing fields also came in for particular scrutiny. Yet Barnes refused to join the national browbeating. He pointing out how, but for a millimetre here and a bit of bad luck there, Britain might easily have performed creditably at Atlanta and he doubted that money alone was the key. After all, because of Wimbledon’s profitability, ‘Tennis gets more than three times as much money as the rest of all the governing bodies of sport put together receive from the Sports Council, and there are more than 100 of them. Henman apart, tennis has for years been a disaster area.’[34] Nonetheless, when Team GB went on to gain eleven gold medals four years later at the Sydney Olympics, many cited the increased funds made available through the National Lottery as a reason. It was there, at Sydney that Redgrave, having transferred with Pinsent to a coxless four, rowed into sporting legend by winning his fifth gold in successive Olympics, a record in an endurance sport. The timing of the race ensured that Barnes had to sprint for the line too, since he only had twenty minutes to file eight hundred words to catch Wapping’s printing deadline. It proved a rare occasion in which the expectation was so high he pre-prepared some of his lines, including the opening sentences parodying the hero’s previous request to be shot if ever he returned to the river: ‘Anyone who sees Steve Redgrave in a boat again has my full permission to knight him. He won his fifth gold medal in five Olympic Games this morning in the greatest five-and-a-bit minutes of sport any of us will ever see.’[35] This remained Barnes’s conviction in the sober light of day. Reflecting on his thirty years in sports journalism in 2004, he still considered Redgrave’s feat the finest moment of them all.[36]

V

It was not just in the sporting arena that the National Lottery made its mark. Despite the moral objections to the state promotion of gambling and the potential repercussions for hooking some of the most socially disadvantaged and desperate, it proved a popular success. Twenty-five million tickets were sold at its launch in November 1994. Indeed, The Times even pondered whether it might prove the most popular development of the Major years.[37] For every pound the punter spent, a little over five pence went to each of five causes – sport, the arts, national heritage, charities and a fund to celebrate the millennium. Such was its popularity – at one stage more than thirty million people indulged in a weekly flutter – that by the summer of 1997, over £3.5 billion had been raised for these five causes.[38] Less surprisingly, the distribution of the largesse provoked a succession of resentments especially among those who claimed to speak for the generally less affluent gamblers who wanted their money to go to children’s homes and animal sanctuaries rather than the deep and badly holed pockets of the Royal Opera House. Thanks to a number of grants to high-profile arts and heritage projects, it looked like one of the most effective mechanisms ever developed to take from the poor in order to give to the more cultured elements within the middle class. The truth, however, was that most of the money went not to grand assertions of high culture but towards helping relatively small projects, not least in deprived parts of the country.

The Times and the ‘arts lobby’ had long since ceased to be natural partners because of the latter’s unending pleas for Government subsidies. The persistent proffering of the begging bowl did not greatly prick the conscience of a newspaper given to free market strictures. It was naturally attractive to the paper that the funds pouring in from the National Lottery could offer a means through which the arts might be given a boost without persistently beggaring the taxpayer. There remained, however, a problem. The Lottery’s cultural largesse was targeted at capital projects – like the construction or upgrading of theatres or art galleries – but not at underwriting ongoing running costs. All was well where the new cultural facilities generated an increased market to support its output. Tate Modern proved perhaps the most prominent success in this regard and a museum of pop music in Sheffield the greatest failure. The number of potential white elephants alarmed The Times and it pointed out that ‘there is no point in building splendid new venues if they place an intolerable strain on a subsidy system that can barely cope with present demands’.[39] The danger was that artistic dreams were running ahead of the market to sustain them. Despite the investment in improving auditoria and related facilities, the patronage of classical concerts was not obviously larger in 2002 than it had been in 1982. Many theatre companies experienced similar fortunes.

It was the financial difficulties of the Royal Opera House that placed The Times in a particular dilemma. On the one hand it represented the sort of high culture the paper’s more refined writers wanted to see promoted. On the other hand, the paper could not easily sustain its criticism of the arts lobby’s benefit dependency while making an exception for what was a fringe interest of – for the most part – the more exulted social classes. Furthermore, ‘the House’ appeared to have lost its way artistically and was trailing behind the English National Opera based at the Coliseum. The will of the arts editor, Richard Morrison, prevailed in the paper, with his argument that if Rome and Milan could only afford one opera house each there was little hope that London could successfully sustain two. Thus, the Coliseum (also in need of investment), should be sold and the ENO could share Covent Garden with the Royal Opera.[40] This line continued to fuel the ongoing correspondence in The Times letters’ page. In the end, the Royal Opera House benefited from a large – and controversial – £78 million cheque from the National Lottery as part of a £214 million restoration project. By the end of the decade, it had regained the artistic initiative and had, in the overused pun, put ‘the House’ back in order.

Being a critic for The Times had long been among the most prized positions on the paper. Yet, as in so many other areas, the scope for complacency had been squeezed in 1986 by the advent of the Independent. In terms of space provided for arts coverage, the ingénue trumped the past master. While the erudite John Higgins had presided over the arts coverage, The Times continued to hold its own in quality, but after he was moved to the obituaries department in 1988, the paper faced intense competition from its new rival which was making vigorous attempts to poach key reviewers. Richard Williams’s focus was sharpest at culture’s more popular end and for a while Mary Ann Sieghart had the impossible task of trying to run both Op-Ed and the arts coverage. It took a heated discussion between Charlie Wilson and Higgins’s protégé, Richard Morrison, for the editor – whose recreations were more the Turf than the Tate – to appreciate that greater investment in covering the arts had become an urgent priority. An orchestral trombonist and organist and Cambridge music graduate, Morrison got his way and, having joined the paper as a classical music reviewer in 1984, he was rewarded on the arrival of Simon Jenkins with the post of arts editor. The rank conferred upon him generalissimo powers over everything from the visual arts to theatre, dance and music. Not given to wanton idleness, he combined this marshalling task with continuing to file reviews himself.

Whether for a concert or the theatre, attending the first night of a performance that might go on past ten o’clock created tremendous pressure on the critic to file before the copy deadline – which was usually around 10.30 p.m. If there was time, the theatre critic Benedict Nightingale would dash into his car and hurtle from the West End to Wapping where he would file his piece and oversee it being subbed onto the page. Sometimes there was not even time for this and he would sit in his parked car typing up his judgment, a communication problem made easier by the advent of the laptop computer and e-mail. Yet, even if the review could be filed by 10.30 p.m., the early editions going up to Scotland, the North or abroad had long since left the presses. Their readers would receive the critics’ verdict a day after the more privileged browsers of London and the Southeast who got the first-night review the morning after it had happened. Those who lived on the distribution boundaries between the different editions were often the worst served by this unfortunate but inevitable arrangement. They might miss the expected review on the Monday by receiving an earlier edition and then miss it on its second showing if they were sold a later edition on the Tuesday. Morrison regularly found himself soothing miffed readers who had unwittingly been caught by this hazard and wanted to know why the paper had not covered an important occasion at the Barbican or the first night of a new and much-heralded production at the National.

Indeed, readers in the provinces often felt that the paper’s artistic coverage was too focused upon events in London. The Times was sensitive to this complaint although it was constrained in its reaction by the greater consideration that most important works were premiered in London, a city that was by a considerable margin the country’s cultural megalopolis. Rather than using regional reviewers, the paper believed it was necessary to judge provincial productions by more easily verifiable metropolitan standards. The result was a large bill for rail fares and overnight accommodation but this was probably better than being reliant on unverifiable opinions and the possibility of regional pride clouding judgments. Certainly there was much to applaud. This was the period in which Simon Rattle, the conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, became one of the most discussed figures in the British arts scene. It was during the summer – when the Proms, the Edinburgh Festival and Bayreuth coincided – that the critics found themselves at their most peripatetic. The really intensive challenge was provided by the Proms since every concert had to be reviewed. Increasingly, this amounted to covering two separate concerts at the Royal Albert Hall each night. The reviewer just had time to nip out for a sandwich and file a review for the first concert before having to return to the auditorium for the second concert – which almost invariably went on past the copy deadline, ensuring publication in the following edition.

The knowledge and dedication of the classical music reviewers was peerless. Barry Millington and Noel Goodwin filed throughout the period covered in this book as did Hilary Finch who began reviewing in 1980 and was, in particular, a discerning writer on chamber music. Debra Craine began her career as the paper’s dance critic in 1989. John Allison began filing in 1994 and Geoff Brown switched from watching the silver screen to the orchestral stage in 1999. Fortunately, reviewing was an area of journalistic activity that involved making highly personal and subjective comments without obedience to the same libel laws that operated over other parts of the paper. While the regular critics betrayed their own tastes, they proved to be above the sort of suspicions that occasionally animated the literary world, especially in the non-fiction market, of giving favourable reviews to the works of friends. Certainly there were a number of caustic remarks that caused injury over the period, but generally artists of whatever discipline held back from responding directly to a poor review. There were a few exceptions. A Higgins review of Jonathan Miller’s production of Tosca did provoke the good doctor’s immortal riposte that it was ‘impertinent in the eighteenth-century sense of the term’. Meanwhile, the meaning of at least one review got lost in translation. Having spent the evening attending an indifferent operatic performance, Stephen Pettitt filed his column down the telephone line referring to what the Innererklang Music Theatre Company had billed as ‘Mouth Music’. Unfortunately, the copy taker miss-heard and typed ‘Mouse Music’. The misunderstanding was then compounded when the review appeared the next morning under the headline ‘I can smell a rat’.[41]

Ideologically, the great battle concerned whether the critic’s primary duty was to explore and interpret the cultural cutting edge or to review performances that were of interest to a wider range of Times readers. Certainly, Paul Griffiths felt most at ease when analysing works that were ‘difficult’. A brilliant and insightful critic who started reviewing classical concerts for the paper in 1973, Griffiths maintained an extraordinary turnover until 1996 when he departed for the New York Times. He was an extoller of the cutting edge, interpreting for a knowing readership the works of Stockhausen and Boulez in the manner of Aaron expounding the thoughts of Moses. The fading allure of these heroes from the concert hall repertoire did not dim his admiration for them and he also championed Harrison Birtwistle. Attending the premiere in the Coliseum of Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus, Griffiths could not contain his excitement: ‘I remarked here a couple of years ago that Birtwistle’s earlier Punch and Judy was the one perfectly satisfactory reinvention of opera since Stravinsky. Now there is another,’ he crooned, before concluding, ‘the world afterwards is different’.[42]

Hailing Birtwistle certainly suggested The Times was not diverted by the popularizing tendencies manifested in the phenomenon of mass-selling compilations of the Three Tenors, the injection of sex appeal through the marketing techniques of the pop world or the advent of a commercially viable radio station, Classic FM. While moving away from the belief that the challenging work was almost by definition the most demanding of attention, The Times did not feel called upon to cover whatever was popular. If there was dumbing down in the paper it did not happen in the arts pages. For those interested in culture as a challenging experience the problem, in so far as there was one, was not of The Times’s making. During the nineties, British composers of the calibre of Judith Weir, John Tavener and James MacMillan continued to write exciting – even inspirational – works. Yet, in matters of international renown, the country could not quite summon a composer of the stature of Benjamin Britten. Indeed, by the last years of the twentieth century, the most ambitious modern composers were to be found in the United States rather than Europe. It was American minimalists like Philip Glass, John Adams and Steve Reich who demonstrated that there was no necessary contradiction between the avant-garde and the popular.

When it came to opera, Simon Jenkins had been determined that The Times could only afford the best. The best was Rodney Milnes, the esteemed editor of Opera magazine who had translated the libretti for the ENO’s productions of Dvorák’s Rusalka and Janácek’s Osud as well as Tannhauser for Opera North, and was probably London’s only working journalist to be a Knight of the Order of the White Rose of Finland (unfortunately he was only allowed to wear the decoration when in the Finnish President’s presence). There was, however, a hitch. Milnes was unsure whether the newspaper that opposed increased state funding of the arts was where he would feel at ease. ‘Do you really want a 1950s leftie?’ he queried. Jenkins and Morrison insisted that indeed they did and Milnes duly came on board. It was a great moment for the paper’s critical credentials. It certainly proved well worth the ensuing periodic disagreements over arts funding policy, with Milnes later admitting, ‘My eight years working with Richard Morrison were among the happiest in my life.’[43] True, there was the wearisome saga of the Royal Opera House’s difficulties prior to its triumphant reopening in 1999 but on a sweeter note, there was also much to celebrate at the ENO and in the emerging talents of David McVicar, Deborah Warner and Richard Jones.

Milnes was certainly not a critic whose enthusiasm for the arts’ cause clouded his critical judgment. He was generally underwhelmed by the emergence of country house opera during the 1990s, believing that Garsington and the Grange were as much about social class as about artistic quality and, as such, were turning the clock back to a dimmer period in the country’s cultural history. He had a far higher opinion of what Glyndebourne offered, especially after 1994 when its Michael Hopkins-designed auditorium provided it with facilities that finally surpassed the better sort of boarding-school pantomime. There were extensive trips, too, across the United States, Russia and Europe in order to bring his judicious observations of the world’s great performances within the reach of every reader of The Times. His audience, indeed, stretched far beyond the confines of the paper. The Italian press’s timidity towards criticizing La Scala meant that – on the sham pretext of displaying British journalism’s impertinent streak – they contrived instead to reprint Milnes’s forthright demolition when Milan’s great opera house failed to meet the mark. At La Scala for a production of Gluck’s Armide, he wrote, in a review more memorable than the performance, that it had been an evening of ‘witless operatic baroquery’ contrived at such expense that it tested even his patience with limitless subsidy. The qualities of the opera itself were totally lost in the ostentatious display of wealth. He took one look at the array of costumes on La Scala’s stage and assured his readers ‘there cannot be an ostrich left in all of Africa with a feather on its hind quarters’.[44]

There was a glorious episode in The Times in 2000 when Milnes – the last single he had bought was one by Gerry and the Pacemakers – accepted the inspired suggestion that he write a critical analysis of Madonna. A weekend was spent exploring her music. Bemused, he concluded that she was an accomplished performer, had better pitch (if far more limited in range) than some opera singers but was labouring with an awful repertoire, most of which she wrote herself.[45] Milnes never let his erudition cloud his powers of expression. Alas, in July 2002, after ten years as The Times opera critic, an attack of deep-vein thrombosis forced him to take his own bow, elegantly signing off his last review from a joyful Glyndebourne performance of Carmen.

By then, the reviewers’ craft had been made a lot more difficult by the diversification of serious music. ‘World music’ – which rarely penetrated the ears of an earlier generation of Times critics – opened up new avenues, quickly becoming standard fare on the South Bank and in the arts pages of the Guardian. The Times came to give it due, if not comprehensive, attention. The broadening range of musical options called for ever-stricter discernment on what was covered. The space available, though, continued to expand. The Times that News International bought in 1981 devoted on average only a single page a day to the arts, in which theatre, gallery, film and music reviews jostled for attention around a main feature. By the end of the eighties this had expanded significantly and during the nineties coverage increased again. The notion that ownership by Rupert Murdoch had somehow lowered the tone was demonstrably nonsense. By 2002, The Times devoted far more coverage to reviewing serious classical music than any of its competitors. With the rhythms of world music energizing its soul, the Guardian, indeed, had fallen back to averaging only about two classical reviews a week. To state that The Times remained the foremost daily record of classical music in Britain would smack of the sort of bombastic immodesty that was alien to its reviewers’ nature. Suffice it to say that it had no superior.

All of this, of course, was for the benefit of a select and discerning audience. By the mid-1990s, classical music made up only a little over 7 per cent of album sales in Britain, about half the combined sale of easy listening, country, folk, jazz, blues and reggae. Seventy-eight per cent of sales were accounted for by pop, rock and dance. One estimate put the British music industry’s worth at £2.5 billion a year, which was more than was being contributed to the economy by the country’s shipbuilding yards, electronic components and water supply.[46] The Times had long recognized the importance of covering jazz music. Not even the departure of Richard Williams in 1989 could dim the paper’s ongoing interest and, happily, Clive Davis continued to provide readers with weekly direction on which recordings to purchase and concerts to attend. Where a great effort was made to broaden the paper’s coverage was in the realm of pop and rock.

Despite his own preference for Glyndebourne over Glastonbury, John Higgins recognized that the tastes of a younger generation needed attention and in 1985, with Nicholas Shakespeare as his scout, he appointed David Sinclair to review rock music. Sinclair, a session musician who had played drums with London Zoo and the CBS-signed band TV Smith’s Explorers, was at that time writing for Kerrang! (before it became fashionable) and had worked at the BBC on The Rock and Roll Years. In one respect it was a courageous appointment in that Sinclair regarded most of the contemporary music scene as a ‘wasteland’. The perfumed pop of the New Romantics and Duran Duran held little appeal for a Rolling Stones admirer whose affinity with The Times dated from Rees-Mogg’s famous 1967 leading article ‘Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?’ which defended the band against a possible jail sentence for drugs possession. However, having a prevailing culture to kick against was an energizing motivation for any critic and Sinclair’s wry and perceptive journalism comfortably outlived many of the pop world’s more transitory acts. It was a bonus too for the paper to have a reviewer who could take turns between writing in the house style and beating the Stones’s Ronnie Wood at snooker. Despite this, his first interview with Mick Jagger was not a success. The conversation had produced some amusing copy – Jagger was on cocksure form and full of anecdotes about some irreverent banter he had recently had with Murdoch – but unfortunately, just as the piece was going to press, Higgins noticed that the iconic rocker had also just given an interview with the Independent. Rival newspapers interviewing the same man was an unconscionable solecism. Sinclair’s tête-à-tête was pulled.

Nonetheless, the rivalry with the Independent was to prove helpful for The Times in broadening its survey of contemporary culture. When Sinclair arrived, the paper’s rock journalism consisted, at most, of two short live concert reviews a week. Yet, faced with the Independent’s challenge the following year, this quickly increased to include album releases, interviews and broader features. Lining up behind Labour’s boycott of the Wapping titles, a few rock artists who, like Paul Weller, were active in the ‘Red Wedge’ movement, refused to have anything to do with The Times. Generally, though, Sinclair was able to make the most of the increasing amount of space being made available in the paper. He did not encounter the subversive demands that band and record company publicists tried to enforce upon the eager young freelancers of the youth press. Even in the irreverent priorities of rock, The Times was accorded a surprising degree of respect.

Spawning acts like the Smiths and New Order, Manchester mounted a claim to being the capital of Britain’s music scene during the 1980s. Tony Wilson offered himself as the city’s impresario, setting up Factory Records. His Hacienda nightclub became the headquarters of the Rave culture and its hedonistic excesses. Briefly a new generation of bands like the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses promised to take popular music in new directions before fizzling out in self-destruction and diminishing inspiration. Certainly, the hypnotic beats of Acid House and Rave were facilitated by the easy availability of drugs, in particular Ecstasy, that gave partygoers the ability to dance for several hours without tiring, although the side effects became a contentious issue and a source of minor moral panic. The loudness of the music and its pill-popping followers fuelled the phenomenon of illegal raves in which an underground network of promoters could, at short notice, seek to evade the attentions of the police and the rights of private property by organizing all-night events in fields. That thousands of young people could find their way to these illicit sites, despite there being little official publicity before the forces of law and order got wind of them, was certainly an indication of the movement’s scale and organizational élan.

While rave culture took hold in Britain, from America came Rap and Hip-Hop – the music of the Afro-American inner city. For Sinclair, though, the most exciting movement emerging from the United States was the proliferation of guitar bands from Seattle in the early 1990s. Appealing to the so-called slacker generation, the foremost exponents of this nihilistic ‘grunge rock’ was the band Nirvana until its acclaimed and tortured lead singer, Kurt Cobain, put himself out of his misery in 1994. ‘Let no one underestimate Cobain’s importance,’ wrote Sinclair in his lament, adding that there was ‘an eternity now left to consider the songs on Nirvana’s four albums’. It was the disaffected attitude of a younger generation that those too old to jump around to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ regarded with something approaching distaste. Bernard Levin – whose musical ear was not well adjusted to grunge – was incredulous at Sinclair’s obsequies, concluding of them that, ‘The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone.’[47]

Cobain’s death closed one musical chapter yet within weeks a new one had opened. It was British and possessed what grunge had lacked – a decent dose of irony. ‘Britpop’ burst upon the scene with the releases of Blur’s third album Parklife and Oasis’s debut Definitely Maybe. The media was encouraged to pitch this as a rivalry between the rough Mancunians of Oasis versus the southern art school graduates in Blur. Enjoying the occasion and the music, Sinclair nonetheless felt that Blur were not quite equal to the adulation. In reviewing Parklife he noted that it reminded him of London bands of the sixties like the Kinks and the Small Faces, although sourer and combining ‘occasionally grating cockneyisms with a ton of disaffected attitude’.[48] As for Definitely Maybe, it might have little depth but, nonetheless, ‘as an uncomplicated celebration of youthful brio this is an album that takes some beating’.[49] The hype surrounding the manufactured battle between Blur and Oasis certainly appeared at odds with their claims to stand apart from the conformities of the music industry. It worked all the same. Oasis’s second album, What’s The Story (Morning Glory), became the biggest selling album in British history. ‘Britpop has succeeded where punk failed,’ suggested Sinclair, ‘essentially by stealing the clothes of the old guard. Rather like new Labour portraying itself as the party of low taxation and sound economic management, the new bands have, generally speaking, got where they are by abandoning any notion of being a “radical alternative”.’[50] Indeed, it was not long before Tony Blair and his circle began to laud such bands, as if there was a link between Britpop and its other artistic bedfellows – what American magazines like Newsweek and Vanity Fair had latched onto as ‘Cool Britannia’ – and the modernizing agenda of New Labour. The irony was that the British music scene had been at its peak during the years of the Major Government and wilted almost as soon as Tony Blair had formally embraced it at a Downing Street party he hosted for its luminaries, including Oasis’s Noel Gallagher and Creation Records’ Alan McGee in July 1997. Shortly thereafter, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, overshadowed the launch of Oasis’s third album. The interment of Britpop was announced. Indeed, the immediate effect of the Princess’s death was to ensure that an updated version of Elton John’s ‘Candle In The Wind’, a song originally written about Marilyn Monroe in 1973, became history’s biggest selling recording.

By then, Britpop was, in any case, eclipsed by a new phenomenon spilling beyond the arts pages and onto the news section – the Spice Girls. They were a chirpy all-female band propelled by a male manager called Simon Fuller and a cry for ‘girl power’ which, although lacking a coherent philosophy, nonetheless resonated with the sort of impressionable teenagers (and pre-teens) who were still buying singles. By March 1997 they had become the first band to reach number one in the charts with their first four releases. ‘Wanabee’, their debut single, reached number one in more than thirty countries including the United States. Spending time with them in Dublin, Sinclair found interviewing them ‘one of the most enjoyable afternoons’ of his professional career. It had been his experience that, on closer inspection, many rock superstars appeared socially awkward and unforthcoming. An interview he had conducted with the singer Prince in New York had been like getting blood out of a stone while George Harrison had appeared to be a shy, introverted man with frightened eyes and – given John Lennon’s fate – an understandably intense interest in his security. The Spice Girls, however, were different. They were friendly, flirtatious and seemingly normal and went out of their way to make the gentleman from The Times laugh.[51] Briefly laying claim to a form of global domination, Geri Halliwell’s assertion (in, of all places, the Spectator) that the group were children of the Thatcher revolution even made the more serious newspapers toy with the notion that they had some cultural significance. ‘In the wacky world of pop,’ Sinclair mused, ‘expressing support for the Tories remains the ultimate taboo. If the Spice Girls can carry that off, they can get away with anything.’[52]

The extraordinary – if brief – appeal of the Spice Girls masked the descent of mainstream pop in the last years of the decade towards no less manufactured but far less impressive ‘boy bands’ and female artists of dehumanized plasticity. That their looks and dance routines had more substance than their music was emblematic of the general level of inanity. Their appeal appeared to be strongest towards the pre-teen age group. Music for a more streetwise generation came instead from those like the Prodigy, the Chemical Brothers and Fat Boy Slim who used ‘sampling’ technology to mix pre-recorded sounds and music extracts into a new blend. The intention was not to record songs to be learned, sung and remembered but to produce spontaneous rhythm sounds for dancers packed into clubs like London’s Ministry of Sound. Sinclair viewed this disinterest in posterity as a return to ‘the original virtues of pop: disposable, ephemeral, effortlessly of the moment’. Popular music’s heroic age – of Dylan, protest and social change – had related to a particular moment in history that had passed for good. As a consequence, ‘Pop is now in the process of reverting to its pre-rock’n’roll function as entertainment with no revolutionary or ideological symbolic strings attached. Thus, while pop in 2000 will continue to be everywhere in evidence it will be nowhere in substance.’[53]

Indeed by the arrival of the twenty-first century, the pop industry’s finances were being undercut by technology that allowed millions of would-be customers to download (usually illegally) music onto their computers or walk around with a pocket Ipod programmed with several thousand tunes. The sheer omnipresence of the music helped to undermine its distinctive qualities. With younger listeners getting out of the habit of buying recordings in shops there was much for the music industry to worry about. Yet the fall in compact disc sales was matched by a trend back towards live performances and an experience distinct from the ease of access that technology provided. With this increase in demand, rock concert ticket prices were able to rise to a level that made the cheaper seats at the Royal Opera House a competitive alternative. The same could be said for season tickets to the Premier League football clubs. Between highbrow art and lowbrow entertainment, market forces had become the great leveller.

The Times chose to engage with this process. Writing from her parent’s council house in Wolverhampton, Caitlin Moran became, at seventeen, the paper’s youngest regular journalist when she was given a brief to pick over the lighter end of popular culture. Aged thirteen, she had won the Dillons’ Young Reader/Writer of the Year Award and three years later she not only became the Observer Young Reporter of the Year but also had her first novel, The Chronicles of Narmo (an anagram of Moran), published. Anxious to attract a fresh voice that could appeal to adolescents and young people, both Simon Jenkins (contrary to his usual instincts) and Richard Morrison encouraged her to write in her own way even though this meant almost physically restraining several subeditors from imposing the house style upon her idiosyncratic expression. One truth was evident: the paper had come a long way since a subeditor corrected – and destroyed the credibility of – an insightful Richard Williams’s review of punk rock by unhelpfully changing the album title in the article to Anarchy In The United Kingdom. In truth, Moran’s accessible manner would not have found favour in The Times of an earlier generation – not that the old journal might have been the worse for the occasional dash of such individuality. Ignoring the increased space made available for reviewing classical music, traditional readers doubtless found the space given to the musings of the precocious teenager from Wolverhampton as evidence that the paper was indeed adopting a dumbing down attitude. Popular culture in the paper might be tolerated when it was judiciously dissected from the traditional lofty artistic standpoint of the reviewer. Moran’s charm was that she discussed the modern world of pop, celebrity and weekend television with indulgent familiarity rather than intellectual analysis. The question of whether it could be justified as art appeared irrelevant. Moran was celebrating what for many millions of people was the essence of modern life.

The diverse choices opened up by the unbridled consumerism also confronted the visual art world. The spread of a technologically advanced media age in which even the least receptive inhabitants were bombarded by images – in newspapers, on television, on cinema screens, on advertising hoardings – was perhaps the greatest challenge facing art since the birth of photography. Paint on canvas would remain a principal medium of expression but a new generation of artists was turning to a wider range of visual resources that included video, film installation and computer-based image manipulation.

Well placed to comment on these developments was Richard Cork who Simon Jenkins personally appointed The Times’s chief art critic in 1991. Cork had previously been the Listener’s critic and was the 1989–90 Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge, his alma mater, where he had lectured on the avant-garde art of the Great War. He had already gained a considerable reputation as an author, with books that ranged from the two-volume Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age to the Social Role of Art and a study of David Bomberg. Other works, including books on Jacob Epstein and his collected journalism, would follow.

While newspapers like The Times always endeavoured to cover major exhibitions around the world, the day-to-day emphasis was, appropriately, on what most readers would have a reasonable chance to view in Britain. Happily for Cork and his audience, the nineties proved to be a decade in which some of the most important art was being made in London. In some respects this was surprising. After the boom of the mid-eighties, art prices had dived and the beginning of the new decade appeared to be a time of great uncertainty for emerging talent. Adversity, however, failed to dampen creativity and a new generation elbowed its way to the fore. There was no guiding principle unifying what was dubbed ‘BritArt’. Some of its exponents had been at Goldsmiths College together, although the majority had not. What they tended to have in common was a lack of youthful idealism and a fascination with decay and death (in this respect, the work of Francis Bacon was a major influence). As one of the selectors for the 1995 British Art Show, Cork played his part in bringing them to public attention. The exhibition proved immensely popular. The great breakthrough proceeded two years later. After successive summers in which the Royal Academy’s exhibitions had failed to engage with a wider public, its decision to open Sensation in the autumn of 1997 put the old institution back at the centre of British art. Sensation displayed works by young British artists (yBas) collected by their greatest patron, Charles Saatchi. The most controversial work was that by Marcus Harvey whose giant painting of Myra Hindley composed from hundreds of children’s handprints, radiated menace. Damien Hirst, the supposed enfant terrible of the generation, was also represented. His 1991 work, a tiger shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde, became perhaps the yBas’ most widely recognized work. Cork believed it shared a ‘kinship with the work of George Stubbs’. Hirst’s other works, including sliced pigs and cows’ heads swarmed over by flies, expressed his interest in mortality. Also on display was a tent inscribed with the names of everyone its creator, the self-reverential Tracey Emin, had ever slept with. Visitors were invited to crawl inside. Meanwhile, Sarah Lucas’s Sod You Gits expressed contempt for tabloid images of female sexuality.

Sensation lived up to its name. Hostile critics found fault with the yBas’ often crude or self-indulgent subject matter and their fixation with ‘shock art’. Traditionalists condemned the prevalence of conceptual installations in which the artist had played little part in personally crafting the work. Richard Cork had no time for such quibbles, delighting instead that ‘the rebels have stormed the bastions of conservatism’ and hoping that if this led to some Royal Academicians carrying out their threat to resign then so much the better since the institution ‘has spent much of the 20th century condemning the most vital impulses in modern art … The show’s arrival is a welcome sign that the Academy has belatedly decided to atone for its disgraceful, antiquated intolerance in the past.’ Cork even ranked Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost (a mould created of a typical London living room) as ‘among the classic British sculptures of the present century’.[54]

A media storm and the reaction of some of the public certainly suggested that art still had the power to shock. It was not just the tabloids and self-declared philistines that came to mock. Even Simon Jenkins thought the yBas’ work was rubbish:

Van Gogh famously wrote of his garbage dump: ‘My God, it was beautiful.’ But he portrayed garbage through the medium of his art. This exhibition (or most of it) takes garbage and, like the Dadaists, puts it in a museum. Art is merely a custodial function, an act of redefinition. The artist is a wordsmith.

… The stuff is mostly the usual mutilations, deformities, sex organs and banalities of the Adrian Mole school of sculpture. The catalogue clothes them in the pretension now obligatory for event art. They are ‘grizzly Gothic macabre’ or ‘post-colonial neo-Victorian’ or ‘a democracy of material and meaning’. If medicine or law described its work in the gibberish used by artists, half Britain would be dead or in jail.

Indeed, as far as Jenkins was concerned, Sensation appeared to be less about the content of what was on display than about the person who had given it meaning by purchasing it. The public were merely being asked ‘to admire Mr Saatchi’s taste, not because anyone can tell a good dead sheep from a bad one, but because Mr Saatchi says Mr Hirst is a good dead-sheep artist. He has sanctified objects and their finders or creators by the act of his patronage.’[55]

Similar objections were made, often by those with less artistic sensitivity than Simon Jenkins, to the works short-listed for the Turner Prize. During the nineties, public interest in this competition soared, thanks in part to Channel 4’s decision to turn it into a television event but also to the new market BritArt’s exponents had helped create. Artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin became personalities in their own right – which in the latter’s case was appropriate given how much of her work was autobiographical. Her appearance, drunk on television drowning out with a string of obscenities Cork’s efforts to discuss modern art’s subtleties, only added to her renown. There was nonetheless a danger that the media interest was transforming the yBas from artists into celebrities whose personal antics were given as much attention as their creativity. For good or ill, art had certainly made itself relevant in this sense of catching the new millennial Zeitgeist of ‘celebrity culture’. Indeed, an audience existed not only to lap up exhaustive coverage of the lives and loves of modern artists and popular entertainers (or, at any rate, the image their publicists proffered) but even descended into the hero worship of the genuinely talentless publicity seekers who appeared on ‘reality television’ shows like Channel 4’s extraordinarily successful Big Brother. ‘This is television for its own sake, pure television,’ warned The Times’s critic, Paul Hoggart, even before the first series of Big Brother had begun. ‘It features people who are on television because they want to be on television, and who want to be on television because they want to be on television even more.’[56] Undaunted, more Britons voted in the Big Brother contestant eviction nights than in the European parliamentary elections. Whether this was a verdict on Brussels or Britain was open to debate.

There were others who deplored the mixture of celebrity trappings and shock art that the Turner Prize appeared to promote in place of more meaningful expressionism. In The Times, the sculptor Sir Anthony Caro criticized the ‘anything goes’ attitude that tolerated what he regarded as the transient and self-indulgent quality of much of the younger generation’s work. The arts lobby was appalled at such effrontery, as if criticizing the new aesthetic orthodoxy was a form of heresy, and Caro’s office received several telephone calls from the Tate Gallery trying to get his remarks withdrawn.[57] Caro had made his observations to Dalya Alberge, who had arrived at The Times from the Independent in 1994. As the new arts correspondent, it was her brief to cover stories of interest for the news pages. This proved a useful point of contact for those wishing to publicize the looming fate of endangered art works and several were saved as a direct consequence of their being brought to the attention of concerned Times readers. Yet the controversies of the contemporary art scene were never far away. On the day in which the 2000 Turner Prize winner was to be announced, Alberge accused one of the nominees of plagiarism. Glenn Brown’s giant canvas, The Loves of Shepherds, was an almost identical copy of Anthony Robert’s jacket illustration for a science fiction paperback novel of 1974.[58]

The Times did not just report on art, it helped make it. In 1998, the paper joined forces with Artangel to pay for a new work of art – the first occasion in which a national newspaper had commissioned an artwork from inception. Cork was on the panel that included Rachel Whiteread and Brian Eno to sift through seven hundred proposals. Trust was eventually placed in Michael Landy, a yBa whose work dealt with issues of modern consumerism. The resulting installation, entitled Breakdown, was three years in the planning and certainly caused a stir. During a fortnight in February 2001, Landy filled an empty former C&A department store in Oxford Street with all his personal possessions, more than seven thousand in all, ranging from his car, his art collection (which included works by Hirst and Emin), love letters and even his remaining postage stamps and the money in his bank account. ‘Everything Must Go’ posters on the windows gave a hint of what was about to happen to them. As 45,000 visitors filed through, Landy and a team of blue overall clad assistants placed each object on a moving assembly line, proceeding to smash them to pieces and put them through a shredder. A sizeable crowd formed outside watching the artist divest himself of all his worldly possessions. The end product finished up in a landfill site. At any rate, Landy had suffered for his art.

What was evident was the extent to which Britain entered the twenty-first century with London’s place in the firmament of contemporary visual art well established. It had become what New York had been in the 1970s and Paris in the more distant past. In Europe, the Venice Biennale was perhaps the major rival, although the variety of galleries and shows in London was without peer. Most of all, the success of Tate Modern was phenomenal. Cork was spoilt for choice. Beside the yBas, a slightly older generation of sculptors like Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor had risen to prominence. Yet, notwithstanding Gormley’s impressive Angel of the North near Gates-head and the construction of new modern galleries like nearby BALTIC (for which Cork voted in favour in his other guise as the chairman of the Arts Council’s visual arts committee) and the Lowry in Salford, British art remained predominantly associated with events in London. If anything, Cork was of the view that the process by which London sucked talent from elsewhere was accelerating.

When in 1998 Daniel Johnson departed for the Telegraph, Peter Stothard made the unorthodox appointment of himself as the new literary editor and for the next year managed to find the time to match books with reviewers while also editing the rest of the paper. Working for him was Erica Wagner who had arrived as Johnson’s secretary. Stothard was impressed by her knowledge and abilities and eventually appointed her to take the reins – although not before mischievously announcing at a staff party that he had finally agreed to step down from the job he had come to love, that of editor … literary editor. His knowledge and appreciation remained nonetheless. He expressed his admiration for Ted Hughes in moving comment articles he penned under his own name at the time of the Poet Laureate’s death and memorial services.[59] Only months earlier he had broken one of London’s best-kept literary secrets when he revealed in The Times that Hughes had written an eighty-eight poem verse narrative, Birthday Letters, that chronicled his troubled relationship with Sylvia Plath. The paper also won the serialization rights of what Andrew Motion regarded as Hughes’s greatest work, ‘as magnetic as Browning’s poems for Elizabeth Barrett, as poignant as Hardy’s Poems 1912–13’.[60]

Despite the expertise and deep interest of Erica Wagner and Peter Stothard, it was dramatic rather than literary tour de forces that continued to receive daily attention in the paper. It was never going to be easy finding a replacement for Irving Wardle, who stepped down after twenty-seven years as The Times’s chief theatre critic in 1990, but Benedict Nightingale proved a worthy successor. Having spent the last few years in the United States, Nightingale was especially able to provide a fresh perspective on the state of British theatre. His mother, Evelyn, had been the first wife of Evelyn Waugh (he had sought revenge following their divorce by unfairly portraying her as Brenda Last in a Handful of Dust). After Charterhouse and the universities of Cambridge and Pennsylvania, Nightingale had embarked upon a career as a drama critic at the Guardian, New Statesman and New York Times followed by three years as Professor of English, Theatre and Drama at the University of Michigan.

Returning to London, Nightingale despaired at the inability of playwrights to examine social and political attitudes unless through ‘reflex indignation and doctrinaire disapproval’. He feared that theatre had become insufficiently dangerous, that it was no longer, as Tom Stoppard said after seeing John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956, ‘the place to be’.[61] Nonetheless, while finding faults, Nightingale was enthusiastic about David Hare’s state-of-the nation trilogy scrutinizing the Church in Racing Demon, the legal system in Murmuring Judges and politics in The Absence of War which featured a People’s Party leader bearing distinct similarities to Neil Kinnock. He especially commended Stoppard’s Arcadia. Hare, Stoppard, Michael Frayn and Harold Pinter were playwrights with distinctive voices. This was lacking in the new generation emerging in the mid-1990s who were disengaged from the old ideologies and assumptions. If they had anything in common, it was what Nightingale dubbed their contribution to the ‘Theatre of Urban Ennui’. There was much to praise in the work of Jez Butterworth, Judy Upton and Patrick Marber. Doubt and less formulaic thinking appeared to be one solution to what Nightingale had previously condemned about the doctrinaire works that had predominated when he arrived back in London from the United States. But there was a concern that, as he put it, ‘the generation between the youthful Marbers and McDonaghs and Pinter, Stoppard and even Hare lacks distinction. Where is the dramatist large-minded enough to deal with the spiralling dilemmas produced by scientific progress, cultural globalisation, political nationalism and personal rootlessness?’ Indeed many of the best dramatists, like Conor MacPherson, Martin McDonagh and Billy Roche, hailed from across the Irish Sea.

Financially, some of the West End’s greatest successes during the decade came from musicals and revivals. Some saw the success of these forms of entertainment as evidence of how sickly British theatre had become – reduced to being fed on a drip by replaying dead playwrights’ back catalogues and by musicals that similarly relied on a compilation of hits from long defunct pop groups like Queen and Abba. Given the financial risks of staging in the West End, it was perhaps understandable that impresarios often preferred the tried and tested to risking all with an innovative work by an obscure hopeful. However, some revivals, like Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of An Inspector Calls, found a new resonance that was rightly rewarded and, as Nightingale observed, ‘in a reductionist era, when the psychological and behavourial sciences are annexing the human spirit, isn’t there something exhilarating in the size, imagination, verbal energy and moral fullbloodedness of, especially, the Greek, Jacobean and Spanish classics?’.[62] In 1999 twenty-four million people visited the theatre in Britain, rather more than attended league football matches. The Almeida and the Donmar Warehouse rose to prominence, the latter finding an inspiring director in Sam Mendes. And while the RSC lurched into crisis under Adrian Noble, Richard Eyre and Trevor Nunn, successive directors of the National Theatre, helped it go from strength to strength. Nightingale remained convinced that British theatre’s successes were made possible by state subsidy and, without it, there would be a collapse. This, he thought, was the main reason why the West End was more lively than its American equivalents. It was, as he also recognized, not the only reason. The British film industry was far less dominant than Hollywood. While the top American actors were sucked into movie making, British theatre audiences could still benefit from performances from great actors at the peak of their powers.

At the cinema, Hollywood production values certainly ensured that the nineties was the decade of large budgets and technologically advanced special effects. Both came together in James Cameron’s Titanic, which cost $200 million to make and confounded expectations that it would suffer the stricken liner’s fate. The world’s most expensive film became the world’s most profitable one. Men allegedly enjoyed it as a disaster movie while women supposedly were attracted to the love story at its heart. ‘Yet for all the sluggish script and the enormous weight of the special effects, this movie behemoth still has the power to shake us rigid and touch the soul,’ wrote The Times’s film critic, Geoff Brown.[63] Yet all too frequently, spending on film making had come to exceed subtler considerations. By the end of the century, Hollywood’s average marketing budget per film had reached $25 million. Fittingly, a tiny budget horror movie, The Blair Witch Project, proceeded to gross among the most substantial receipts. Indeed, violent and often psychopathic behaviour played a starring role in many of the more noteworthy films of the decade with Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction – whose ‘very gusto keeps total nihilism at bay’ according to Brown – proving the most impressive.[64]

As the century drew to a close, Britain appeared to be providing many of the great actors but failing to make any serious challenge on Hollywood’s grip on production. Inadequate funding and lack of distribution rights remained gripes although when National Lottery money was invested it mostly subsidized commercial (and worse, artistic) flops. There were, of course, periodic triumphs when a film scored highly in both departments. Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient and John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love, co-scripted by Tom Stoppard, received their due at the Oscars. The great commercial success was the 1994 romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral which helped turn its star, Hugh Grant, into the poster boy for England’s bumbling, self-effacingly witty English white upper-middle class. Brown admired the blend of ‘tart modern manners with old-fashioned romance’ and its bottling of the ‘key Merchant – Ivory ingredients: elegance, posh clothes, snob appeal’ alongside the repressed emotions displayed in Grant’s character. Others were less delighted. As with the Merchant-Ivory productions of E. M. Foster’s novels during the 1980s, that this was the image of Britain still being portrayed across the world to large and enraptured audiences only damned it further among those who wanted to see the country given a cooler, non-elitist, multi-ethnic, cutting-edge international profile. They were to be further antagonized when Four Weddings’s writer, Richard Curtis, followed up his success five years later with a similar format in Notting Hill. Less prone to post-imperial angst, the public, like the critic in The Times, Nigel Cliff, enjoyed the return, relieved that Hugh Grant was still on form, ‘playing Hugh Grant as only he can’.[65]

Yet Britain’s cinematic contribution to the nineties was not all floppy hair or period-piece corsetry. Working-class grit featured in the comedies Brassed Off and The Full Monty which dealt with the post-Thatcher, postindustrial landscape of the North of England with its threatened sense of community and punctured male pride, while East is East demonstrated there was a mainstream audience for a wry look at multicultural Britain. A film with the unpromising title of Trainspotting was the work that attained the greatest cult status. Directed by Danny Boyle from the novel by Irvine Welsh, it concerned the trials of four drug-abusing losers from the non-postcard side of Edinburgh with particularly plausible performances from Ewan McGregor who played Renton, the character attempting to go straight, and Robert Carlyle as the psychotic Begbie. Its amorality and ‘sense of life ripped from the gutters’ was not to Geoff Brown’s taste, although he accurately conceded that younger audiences would enjoy its adrenalin rush.[66] By turns comic, endearing, revolting and surreal, Trainspotting blended fine acting, a quotable script, a hip soundtrack, a modicum of violence and all the tricks that also gave Tarantino such a transatlantic following – but with a Scots accent.

There were voices untamed by Received Pronunciation, too, in the fashion world. John Galliano was building his reputation, as was Alexander McQueen, an East End ‘bad boy’ with a Penchant for buttock baring. Their extravagant and colourful designs caused a sensation and helped to push fashion journalism into the news pages of the paper. That British designers were conquering the fashion world but that London was still not its capital was evident when both men went off to Paris to work for Dior and Givenchy. British designers, like British actors and directors, appeared to have internationally recognized talents but lacked a home industry of sufficient scale and investment to sustain them. Instead, their creativity was applauded in foreign currencies.

This was nonetheless an exciting period in the fashion world and The Times was particularly fortunate in 1998 to attract the fashion features director of Vogue, Lisa Armstrong, to assume command over its coverage. ‘It is entirely to the point,’ Nigella Lawson had written three years earlier, ‘that the Princess of Wales once appeared, in model pose, on the front of Vogue: where once covergirls wanted to be princesses, now princesses want to be covergirls.’[67] By the time of Lisa Armstrong’s arrival at The Times the age of the supermodel was giving way to a fresh inter-relationship between fashion, film stars and the cult of celebrity. Designers could get as much exposure from seeing their creations worn by an actress attending the Oscars or a premiere – especially in terms of front- or news-page coverage – than from the catwalk recognition of a leading fashion show. Likewise, sporting the work of an acclaimed designer could vastly improve the public profile of an actress, as Liz Hurley discovered when she wore what became popularly referred to as ‘that dress’ by Gianni Versace. If any event demonstrated the democratization of fashion it was the media reaction to Versace’s murder in July 1997. It was on the front page of The Times and was the subject of no fewer than thirteen articles in the paper that and the following day. The violent nature of his death played some part in the extent of the exposure, but the response from the tabloids – for whom the life and work of expensive fashion designers had not traditionally been considered close to readers’ hearts – was more extraordinary. The Sun devoted nine pages of coverage on the first day alone. High fashion had moved beyond the preserve of the chic, the wealthy and the cultivated.

The reasons for this democratizing process were, in part, economic. Clothes had become cheaper. What was more, within days of a top fashion designer’s new collection appearing on the catwalk and in photo spreads across the newspapers, low-cost derivatives were available in the high streets for those with more modest budgets. It was even possible to purchase skirts or handbags that were closely influenced by leading designs in supermarkets. Buying into a ‘label’ became particularly important for those whose interest was primarily in making a social statement. Fashion houses like Gucci invested large sums in promoting their brand names. For some, there was a danger that brand advertisement was supplanting attention to design. The process through which the smaller fashion companies continued to be swallowed up by the larger ones helped foster these commercial empires. A phenomenon developed in which high-quality brands were devalued precisely because they were adopted as the badges of the masses. A more general trend was that the clothes to bare flesh ratio swung increasingly towards the latter with fewer and skimpier fabrics predominating as the decade wore on. By the century’s end, The Times’s coverage had never been better or its reputation higher, with Lisa Armstrong and her team at the forefront of the effort to make it a paper of broader interest to women. The glossy monthly fashion magazines continued to have the pictorial advantage, but because they were tied to production schedules that necessitated feature planning weeks or even months in advance, they lacked the daily newspapers’ versatility. The Times’s Saturday magazine was able to respond with glossy space for photo shoots as well, but it remained in the newspaper section, especially after the launch of the T2 tabloid in 2000, that the higher quality in writing was put to best effect. There was no shortage of material. As Armstrong pointed out, ‘ultimately, fashion is about expression’.[68]

Attractiveness was not the only form this articulation took. Given the breadth of its embrace and the money involved, the fashion world continued to have a dark side that gobbled up and spat out those it manipulated. In the early nineties, the preference for unhealthily thin waif-like models was blamed for an upsurge in anorexia and eating disorders among young girls. Particularly noxious was the so-called ‘heroin chic’ look that used etiolated models who appeared listless and dazed on drugs – often because they were. This destructive look was featured not only in British magazines like i-D and The Face but was even read as a possible subtext for Corinne Day’s pictures of Kate Moss that appeared in Vogue. It soon went transatlantic and entered the advertising mainstream with companies like Calvin Klein using models who, to put it mildly, conveyed neither health nor happiness. If, in this respect, The Times was not at the forefront of a fashion movement then that was a point in its favour. Fearing that elements within the fashion world were effectively promoting drugs in order to sell their product and exploiting young girls, the trend was much criticized in works like Michael Gross’s Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women and in a 1997 speech (after the fad had largely passed) by President Clinton. It was certainly not a look that The Times actively promoted although, as Lisa Armstrong subsequently attested, ‘after the sublime vacuousness of 1980s fashion photography, with its cartoon notions of glamour’ the approach of the early nineties was more an attempt at social commentary and as revolutionary as punk had been in the 1970s at ‘peeling back traditional layers of fashion artifice’.[69]

Health scares and symptoms of illness were the preserve of the former Norfolk Tory MP, Dr Tom Stuttaford. The Times’s medical correspondent since 1982 and expert columnist since 1991, he was one of the most prolific, knowledgeable and popular writers on the paper. His briefings provided valuable diagnosis, delivered with authority and accessibility. They were also particularly strong in advice on preventative medicine. The issues of dieting and healthy eating were also regularly examined by Nigel Hawkes, the science editor. Hawkes was a natural sceptic and as such saw it as a scientific duty to probe rather than give unquestioning credence to each new theory, fad or headline-grabbing scare. He questioned the nutritionists’ craze for portraying fats, salt and sugar as dangerous health risks. Indeed, as he subsequently observed, obesity increased during a decade in which fatty foods were trimmed from the national diet. The French, meanwhile, ate more fat and more cholesterol than either the British or the Americans but suffered only half as many heart disease-related deaths.[70] He was similarly alarmed at what he believed were scare stories demonizing gene-modified crops as dangerous ‘franken foods’. Always he wanted to examine more closely the scientific evidence for such claims. In Britain, at least, he was battling against a tide. Environmentalism proved to be one of the most potent ideologies of the post-Communist era. Depressing stories of pollution and species depletion dominated the ever-increasing workload of successive environment editors, Michael McCarthy and Nick Nuttall.

No environmental issue attracted so much alarm as the belief that the planet was being wrecked by man-induced global warming. No sooner had the fear of nuclear annihilation been diminished by the Cold War’s thaw than this new threat to life on earth rose to become almost an accepted wisdom. One who begged to differ was Hawkes. An Oxford metallurgy graduate who had worked for Nature and subsequently the Observer before joining The Times, he had in the 1970s reported the contentions of leading scientists that the earth was destined for a second Ice Age. He suspected the new global warming claims were alarmist and based on unreliable computer predictions drawn from too little real information. He wanted to know, if the equation was so simple, why temperatures had decreased when carbon emissions had multiplied in the previous decades of the century. ‘Global warning has turned into an inverted pyramid of implications resting on a handful of facts,’ he wrote when chiding Margaret Thatcher for her claim that the world had to act decisively to curb carbon emissions. ‘Fortunately, the human appetite for sacrifices is limited and its attention-span is short,’ Hawkes prophesied. ‘A couple of cold winters will take the froth off the debate, and allow us the time we need to discover whether or not the earth is really warming up.’[71] The cold weather, however, did not come to Hawkes’s rescue, and as the accumulation of information improved during the decade, he tempered his scepticism on the subject. Nonetheless, it disturbed him that it was always the worst-case scenarios that attracted the headlines while research that suggested temperature change might be less severe, or even had some countervailing benefits, was largely ignored by the media. At heart, he believed environmentalism was an ideology that cherry picked the facts to support its case and disregarded those that challenged it. It was, he thought, not a very scientific approach.

On 1 January 1996, The Times was launched on the internet. In April a new supplement, Interface, edited by Keith Blackmore, was started and ran weekly for the next five years. It kept readers abreast of developments in cyberspace and explored the expanding horizons of information technology during a period in which there was much excited talk about how such developments were creating a ‘new paradigm’ in world economics. Stothard recognized the website’s importance, but did not allow himself to be diverted by some of the hyperbolic claims being made about how the print edition would recede into history. He not only believed that the paper edition had a future but that it should remain the centre of his attention. In Stothard’s opinion, the online edition reproduced the paper’s content rather than provided an alternative or enhanced service.

Stothard’s measured approach contrasted with the competition. The Daily Telegraph and the Guardian had both launched websites the year before The Times. In particular, the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, channelled considerable resources into Guardian Unlimited, which offered readers far more material than was available in the print edition. This was an expensive investment but one that it was hoped would eventually produce a return once increasing proportions of the world turned first to their computers, pocket screens and even mobile telephones for information rather than to newsprint. When the dot.com bubble burst in 2000, Stothard’s attitude looked more sagacious than those who had got caught up in a modern equivalent of tulipmania and other past speculative catastrophes. Wild expectations that the Internet would ensure exponential growth as a virtual poster site for advertisers withered almost overnight. Unfortunately, News Corp. had begun to invest heavily and was among those financially damaged when the collapse occurred. Development programmes for The Times’s online edition had to be curtailed. The future, it seemed, was not on the world wide web after all.

It was at this moment, when expansion gave way to retrenchment, that a new online business development officer arrived at Wapping. The Dutch-born Annelies Van Den Belt had experience of the necessity for a cool head in a crisis, having previously run operations for the St Petersburg Times and the Moscow Times in the midst of Russia’s economic turmoil. Collapsing online advertising revenue disabused any who retained the notion that Times Online would generate vast returns. Yet, while finding ways of cutting costs, Van Den Belt rolled out a strategy for generating fresh sources of subscriber revenue. An online version of the paper, instantly available around the globe, was particularly valuable to British expats and others with an interest in Britain who lived in parts of the world where the paper edition was obtainable a day late, if at all. This market would later, in 2004, be offered a full subscription-only digital edition, or e-paper, that reproduced the paper edition exactly on the screen, allowing the viewer all the casual browse and page-turning navigation that the headline-driven online edition lacked. This was a service that was withheld from the British market. For that home market, the strategy was one of introducing rolling charges rather than full upfront subscription. Charging for accessing home or breaking news was not sensible when online users could surf rival news sites for information of broadly comparable quality freely. In this respect, there was competition not only from the other online broadsheets but also from the BBC’s news website, which, being licence-fee funded, had vast resources at its disposal and was likely to remain free as part of the Corporation’s public service remit. Instead, The Times’s task was to identify which parts of the paper represented a unique product for which online users would be prepared to pay a charge. Thus, basic access would be free but there would be a charge for specialist content. The first area identified in this way was the crossword. Times Online’s ‘crossword club’ succeeded in attracting enough subscribers to more than cover its costs. Other areas followed. A large proportion of internet use concerned business research and Times Online was able to generate money by charging for access to its archive and to law reports. Improved palm-size technology offered other downloading opportunities. Sport and business alerts could be sent to mobile phones for a charge. By 2002, subscription revenue was accounting for 20 per cent of the site’s overall revenue. All the classified advertisements for jobs, holidays and promotions that appeared in the print edition became available in the online format. Display advertising provided additional revenue. While the reckless enthusiasm of the late 1990s had subsided, there was every reason to assume that the sums generated in this way would accumulate substantially in the years ahead.

Halfway through the twenty-first century’s first decade, it was too early to make a judgment on whether The Times’s cautious approach was the right one. Times Online employed less than a third of the staff engaged in producing Guardian Unlimited. While the British broadsheets continued to make most of their content free to home users, the Financial Times had decided to make most of its content available only to subscribers. In the short term at least, this proved expensive. FT.com consumed a large share of its owner Pearson’s £184 million investment in internet services in 2000 alone.[72] Such figures dwarfed what Times Online consumed. The Guardian and FT were laying down enormous investments in the hope of establishing a secure grip on a potentially lucrative future market. One early consequence was that the Guardian, with a strong American following, was the most popular British broadsheet on the web. Whether this market share could be sustained once subscription fees were eventually hiked up remained to be seen. The Times had opted for a middle way and in doing so moved into second position in the number of hits its website recorded, behind the Guardian. There were advantages in having a reduced outlay of expense. By 2004, Times Online had even broken into profit. The death of the paper edition certainly did not appear remotely imminent, but the electronic edition had nonetheless established its place as a fundamental component of The Times’s future.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE HEART OF EUROPE

Losing Faith in the Tories; Euro-Scepticism; Blair

I

Peter Stothard was four days into his editorship when sterling was forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Having been in the United States for almost all of Major’s administration up until that point, he had returned at the very moment the Government’s credibility collapsed. The result, Stothard later maintained, was that ‘I never saw a good day of the Major government.’[1]

Sterling exited the ERM on Black Wednesday, 16 September 1992. It was a humiliation for Norman Lamont, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, yet it was understandable that John Major believed sterling’s exit from the ERM was not a resigning matter. Joining the system had, after all, been Major’s principal act while Lamont’s predecessor at the Treasury. Despite advice to the contrary, he had even insisted on the high sterling to Deutschmark parity. If it was a resigning matter, then there would be fingers pointing at the Prime Minister.

As a discipline that drove out inflation, ERM membership had already succeeded in its task, yet the Government had remained committed to it nonetheless partly because it had no alternative economic strategy and also because a free-floating currency was incompatible with the Maastricht criteria for joining the euro. By March 1992, 1200 businesses a week were folding. There were 40 million square feet of unwanted commercial property in London alone. As Britain prepared for autumn, unemployment reached 2.8 million. The Conservatives’ reputation for economic competence was in tatters. Regardless, the Government persevered with a policy that necessitated raising interest rates to defend sterling’s overvalued parity at a time when British business, deep in recession, needed a reduction in the cost of borrowing and a cheaper currency with which to trade. Repeatedly, the leading columns of The Times advised Major to renegotiate the terms while there was still a chance.[2] The Prime Minister, however, was nothing if not a man of his word. In the last days, despite all the signs that sterling’s rate within the ERM was unsustainable, the Government wasted £3.3 billion and the Bank of England parted with £25 billion of its reserves in a forlorn attempt to stop the currency falling through the floor of its fixed trading bands.

‘With one bound we are free,’ whooped Anatole Kaletsky, whose financial analysis had been promoted to the front page during the crisis. While others, engulfed by the sense of national defeat, prophesied further bad economic news, he argued that letting sterling float and cutting interest rates would ensure an economic recovery. He did not disguise his disdain for the incompetence of ‘the political and business establishment, the prime minister, the captains of industry, the City bankers and above all, the Treasury knights’ whose abrogation of financial sovereignty to the Bundesbank had ensured ‘a million people have lost their jobs. Hundreds of thousands have been made homeless and bankrupt.’ Kaletsky, indeed, was one of a select few who had warned of the dangers from the moment Major had – to the acclaim of informed opinion – first taken Britain into the ERM nearly two years earlier.

Major had an opportunity, if he wished to take it, to set a new course that put a positive spin on a floating currency and low interest rates and turned its back on immediate aspirations to join a single European currency. His failure to do so crushed any lingering Euro-sceptics’ hope that he was secretly on their side but had merely been playing a long game for tactical reasons. In consequence, he had to contend with the virulent enmity of daily denouncements from Euro-sceptics, either, if they were his own backbenchers, to the television cameras on College Green, or, if they were writers, in the pages of papers like The Times.

The official HMSO version of the Maastricht Treaty was not published until May 1992, more than six months after it was signed. Constitutional lawyers pored over its implications. At the time of its signing, The Times, like all other British media organizations, had no means of knowing its exact content and had to rely on the interpretation Major and his press office put on it. Once fuller details became available, The Times’s ardour cooled substantially. Simon Jenkins, who had applauded Major’s efforts in December 1991 from the editor’s chair, was among those who felt duped. In his new role as a Times columnist, he denounced Maastricht as ‘the worst treaty since Versailles’.[3] Be that as it may, it was now clear to both Jenkins and Peter Stothard that the Prime Minister so believed his own propaganda about winning ‘game, set and match’ at Maastricht that no argument or event would disabuse him of the notion. Even before Black Wednesday, the Danes, on 2 June, had stunned all Europe by daring to reject the Treaty in a national referendum. Their veto invalidated it. Twenty-four hours after the verdict of Copenhagen, nearly one hundred Tory MPs had signed an early-day motion calling for a ‘fresh start’ and a change in Europe’s direction. They were dumfounded when their Prime Minister reacted to the news by suggesting that it was the Danes – rather than the EU – who needed to think again.

Over a very short period of time, Euro-scepticism had gone from being perceived as a modern variant on flat earth-ism to a respectable analysis of the disengagement between politicians and public. Four days after sterling fell through the ERM trapdoor, the French referendum called by President Mitterrand to demonstrate the strength of his country’s pro-Europeanism recorded a ‘yes’ majority to Maastricht of just over 1 per cent. If support for the European project had waned so much in the country that had led it for the past thirty-five years, it was hardly surprising that the Danes had – by an equally narrow margin – voted against it. Nor were they the only ones. Despite the adherence of the German political elite and the constitutional bar on referenda, opinion polls suggested most Germans were opposed to scraping the Deutschmark. In Britain, there could have been no more personalized example of how the intellectual mood had changed among Tory-minded journalists than in the case of William Rees-Mogg. During his editorship of The Times between 1967 and 1981, he had been a strong advocate of Europeanism and regarded his paper’s support for British membership of the EEC (as it then was) as among the greatest legacies of his years in the chair. Although he remained a supporter of that decision, his enthusiasm for integration had waned considerably. Not content to assault Maastricht repeatedly from his perch on the Op-Ed page, he mounted a High Court challenge to its becoming law.

Major was adamant that there would be no referendum in Britain. Spades were handed out for what promised to be a lengthy bout of parliamentary trench warfare. The Tory Party conference in October descended into a shouting match and a Commons revolt in November reduced the Government’s majority to three. When, in the new year, the bill to approve the Maastricht Treaty entered its committee stage, five hundred amendments and one hundred new clauses were proposed by Euro-sceptics content to wear the Government down in this war of attrition. The old contemptibles who had opposed Heath’s original entry made up the core of the Tory rebellion in the Commons but they had been joined by a younger generation of dogged sceptics that included Bill Cash and Michael Spicer. It was these two MPs who led what became effectively a party within a party, complete with London HQs, separate financing and a back room full of eager young men down from Oxbridge whose youthful idealism to liberate Britain from Brussels echoed a previous generation’s zeal to free Spain from Fascism. Although Stothard had always resisted getting too close to any one politician or interest, he had enjoyed gatherings of the Conservative Philosophy Group and other Thatcherite think tanks during the 1980s and found himself similarly drawn to the cabals and coteries that formed around the Euro-sceptic banner. Brushing aside those who thought Bill Cash was too driven on the subject, Stothard enjoyed Cash’s company, noting, ‘at least he had some strong arguments’.[4]

Rees-Mogg’s legal challenge failed on 30 July 1993 and three days later Maastricht was formally ratified. The Danes, too, had been persuaded to reconsider their objection while Austria, Finland and Sweden were poised to join an EU increased from twelve to fifteen member states. Yet, at Westminster and Wapping, the Euro-sceptics appeared unwilling to concede defeat and their hounding of the Prime Minister continued. On 28 November 1994 (the night Norway rejected joining the EU in a referendum), Major only won a Commons division on increasing Britain’s contribution to the EU budget by threatening to resign if the vote was lost. Given the unpopularity of his party this was leadership through suicide pact. Even still, eight Tory MPs rebelled. When the whip was withdrawn from them another MP opted to join them. The Government no longer had a Commons majority. In December, the vote on imposing VAT on domestic fuel was lost. In the words of Norman Lamont (who Major had finally got round to replacing with the pro-European Ken Clarke), the Government appeared to be in office but not in power.

II

Unlike Margaret Thatcher, John Major was an assiduous reader of the press. Given his thin-skinned reaction to criticism, this was perhaps a mistake. Across Fleet Street he could count on very few allies. Stewart Steven at the Evening Standard and Bruce Anderson, the Spectator’s political editor, argued his corner but elsewhere the collapse in support for the Tory Government from once-friendly newspapers was astonishing. Among the senior journalists at The Times, Stothard, Daniel Johnson and Martin Ivens all took great exception, in particular, to Major’s failure to steer a more Euro-sceptic course. Anatole Kaletsky shared their contempt and Mary Ann Sieghart represented for him the worst of both worlds – a Euro-sceptic and New Labour supporter. The Times, though, was not governed by a party line. In their columns, Woodrow Wyatt and Matthew Parris bravely gave the Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt while Peter Riddell, the political editor, was a committed supporter of his attempts to keep Britain positively engaged in the process of European integration. Riddell, indeed, took a completely different line from that emanating from the editorial conferences and argued that Maastricht would ‘in time, be seen as the start of a new, more diverse EC’.[5] Thus, Major retained the support of some of the most widely read columnists in the paper. He had one other advocate. The deputy editor, John Bryant, shared his love of sport and believed The Times was not giving him a fair chance. Indeed, he suspected that many of those who despised him so vehemently were motivated by a deep-seated social and educational condescension towards the Prime Minister whose degree came from the university of life. ‘They had pretty much decided that they didn’t like him because he was too downmarket’ was Bryant’s assessment of his colleagues’ attitude.[6]

Neither Major nor his private office made much attempt to court The Times. Stothard thought Major’s reticence was perhaps to his credit. Major did occasionally provide Stothard with warm gin and tonic around the Cabinet table, but he received far less attention from the Prime Minister than he had from his predecessor, even though he had then held far more junior rank at the paper. Even Sarah Hogg, head of the Downing Street Policy Unit, did not attempt to call in old favours despite having worked with Stothard at The Times prior to the move to Wapping. She did, however, express surprise that Major and Stothard did not get on given that, as far as she could see, they came from similar backgrounds – an observation that caused the Oxford Classicist’s eyebrow to rise.[7]

It was Simon Jenkins who launched the articles in The Times that caused particular upset in Downing Street. He was the first journalist to refer (in an otherwise supportive article) to an alleged Prime Ministerial breakdown. ‘Certainly he wobbled inside Admiralty House on Black Wednesday, by some accounts wobbled alarmingly,’ Jenkins wrote. This fired the starting gun for others to repeat rumours that were circulating throughout Westminster. On 21 October 1992, Graham Paterson and Andrew Pierce wrote a lengthy article entitled ‘Can Major Take the Strain?’ Using unnamed ‘friends’ of the Prime Minister as its sources, it stated that Major was not eating properly and was lonely in the evenings because his wife preferred to live in Huntingdon. A professor of organizational psychology was quoted stating that such unstable eating patterns ‘indicate a man in the second phase of a stress disorder’. There was certainly more supposition in the article than was consistent with being the journal of record. The worst slur, however, concerned the events of Black Wednesday. ‘There is a deep reluctance from Mr Major’s close colleagues and civil servants to divulge anything about the prime minister’s bearing during that day,’ Paterson and Pierce winked. ‘But for five weeks one question has been asked again and again in Westminster and Fleet Street: did he crack up?’ One man who had spent time with Major during that day was Norman Fowler, the party chairman (and a former Times journalist). He immediately took the unusual step of denouncing the article as ‘nasty and malicious’. A wellbriefed Daily Mail was particularly vociferous in attacking The Times’s efforts, providing its readers with a point-by-point refutation of the claims made by Paterson and Pierce.[8] Stothard remained convinced that his source was ‘impeccable’.[9] In his autobiography, Major described the rumours as a ‘malicious invention’.[10]

The attacks intensified. At the Daily Telegraph, Max Hastings had spiked a commissioned article by Paul Johnson that argued in fine polemical style that Major was not fit to be Prime Minister.[11] Stothard published it in The Times instead. Rees-Mogg soon came to share Johnson’s contempt for Major, writing:

He seems to be the most over-promoted of the seven [post-war Tory Prime Ministers]. He is not a natural leader; he cannot speak; he has a weak Cabinet which he has chosen; he lacks self confidence; he has no sense of strategy or direction. Even on Europe he does not stand for any great issue … His ideal level of political competence would be deputy chief whip, or something of that standing.[12]

The dislike for Major, for his European policy and for his failure to come to grips with the sleaze allegations that were engulfing so many of his colleagues tended to diminish his Tory critics’ appreciation for those parts of his agenda that took Thatcherism forward. Yet plans to privatize British Rail, deregulate London buses, reduce the Post Office’s monopoly and produce Audit Commission league tables on councils’ performance were drawn up nonetheless. John Major had launched his Citizen’s Charter back in July 1991. It aimed to apply the language of rights and expectations to consumers’ use of public sector services. The intention was to increase choice, quality, value for money and accountability. Patients and parents would be permitted to see league tables of how their local health and education authorities were performing. NHS patients who had waited over two years for an operation would be entitled to treatment within the next three months or have the health authority pay for them to be treated privately. For the first time, there would be a legal requirement for schools to be independently inspected regularly. Public utilities would be forced to give compensation for poor service. Passengers would receive refunds if their trains were cancelled or subject to unreasonable delays and the emergency services would be subject to new 999 response target times.

There was, however, a downside. The granting of contractual rights to users of public services and the separation of powers between providers and scrutinizers necessitated the creation of a new army of inspectors and regulators to monitor and enforce standards. Some of these, like the ‘Cones Hotline’ (a service that allowed drivers to report delayed road works) quickly became the butt of jokes and condescension. More importantly, a new level of bureaucracy was created that proved expensive and a time-consuming distraction to the public sector employees it was trying to hold to account but was sometimes frustrating their professional judgment. This regulatory burden continued to impose itself when some of the utilities, like the railways, were privatized. For those that remained within the public sector, it was all part of a wider Tory strategy to create internal markets in areas of the economy that could not be privatized and, in doing so, to make them more responsive to consumer rather than producer interests. The policy had started in the 1980s, when local authorities were forced to offer out some of their services to ‘competitive tender’. During the summer of 1991, the programme was rolled out in what became a central feature of the Government’s domestic legislation. School and hospital league tables became popular measures by which the public could gain information on the provision of services in their area. Slowly, the number of patients waiting very long periods for NHS treatment was reduced. Before the new standards and inspections were enforced, some schools did not even trouble themselves to provide parents with annual reports on their child’s progress. Chris Woodhead, appointed the Chief Inspector of Schools, became a familiar scourge of the so-called ‘trendy teacher’. When his Office of Standards in Education (Ofsted) compiled evidence that illuminated low standards in many schools, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers union responded by calling for Ofsted to be abolished. The Times, though, saluted Woodhead’s efforts and the drive to make the performance of schools as well as hospitals more transparent.[13] In November 1992, The Times was able to publish an official table of national school GSCE and A-level performances for the first time.

Accompanying the new world of Charter Marks and regulatory bodies, the Tories turned their attention once again to higher education. Having expressed his determination to make Britain a classless society, Major declared that ‘at the heart of our reforms is the determination to break down the artificial barrier which has for too long divided an academic education from a vocational one’.[14] Polytechnics would be allowed to call themselves universities. Indeed, the Government, with Ken Clarke as its Education Secretary bringing the changes onto the statute book, wanted to see a third of young people receiving higher education degrees by the end of the decade. Although The Times later became a great critic of expanding entrance to higher education beyond what it regarded as the limitations of its applicants and the grade inflation that accompanied it, the paper did not rush to criticize the move. Taking a free-market approach to the issue, it hoped that the transformation from polytechnics into universities would enhance competition for students and resources – a process that need not mean a dilution in standards.[15] Certainly, the polytechnics leapt at the opportunity to upgrade their status. Within a very short space of time, a higher education system with almost one hundred universities was created. For The Times, one consequence was the decision taken following the 1992 graduation ceremonies to end the practice of printing degree results. In one sense, this abandonment marked yet another retreat from the paper’s pretensions to be the journal of record (albeit that until 1986 it had only bothered to print non-Oxbridge degrees if they were first-class honours). However, the increasing number of degree-awarding institutions meant either causing offence by only persisting with publishing the results from the traditional universities or giving the paper during the summer months the appearance of a metropolitan telephone directory.

The greater consequence of the expanding number of universities concerned how potential students could differentiate between what they offered. In a phrase that doubtless made degree holders from the likes of Imperial, UCL, Bristol and Edinburgh wince, The Times declared that ‘until now, Britain has been different: outside Oxford and Cambridge, a university degree has carried much the same weight, whatever its source’.[16] This was a gross exaggeration and a glib insult, but the expansion of degree-awarding bodies certainly made the claim that all universities were equal far less tenable. To differentiate, in 1992 The Times Good Universities Guide led the way with the first ranking of them according to various criteria that ranged from the qualifications of the staff, the amount of library spending per head and the quality of student accommodation. It was a major undertaking, beset with problems of comparing potentially non-compatible statistics and deciding what weighting should be attributed to which measurements. The task was entrusted to Tom Cannon, a former director of the Manchester Business School. His efforts were made yet more difficult by the deliberate obstruction of some of the institutions concerned. Indeed, many vice-chancellors (and not just those of the worst-performing universities) vehemently denounced the attempt to create a ranking system even though something similar had existed in the United States for more than a decade. The chairman of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals and his equivalent on the Committee of Directors of Polytechnics responded with an open letter that stated, ‘We believe the tables are wrong in principle, flawed in execution and constructed upon data which are not uniform, are ill-defined, and in places demonstrably false.’[17] They had a point: raw statistics were a most imprecise science and no guarantee of the ‘value added’ strengths of what was on offer. Nonetheless, they were more useful to the consumer who, able for the first time to compare so much information in one place, no longer had to rely on the only real alternative guide – hearsay and snobbery, real or inverted. The first Times ranking placed Cambridge ahead of Oxford by only a fraction of a point and the two ancient institutions continued this closely contested pre-eminence, followed by the science-only Imperial College London, throughout the ensuing decade. At the other end of the scale, the universities propping up the ranking, all former polytechnics, continued to protest that the points system took insufficient account of the problems they laboured with and, indeed, by branding them failures, only added to the divisiveness of higher education. In response to this, The Times stood firm: having opted to join the league of universities, ‘they must expect to be judged against the best’.[18]

III

Everything that the ERM’s supporters claimed would happen if sterling was allowed to float failed to happen. Instead, 1993 began with interest rates falling to 6 per cent (their lowest level since 1977) and inflation to 1.7 per cent (the lowest for a quarter of a century). The ‘feel good’ factor took longer to return. With the housing market remaining stagnant, heavily mortgaged families that had bought during the 1980s boom were locked into negative equity. It was a gloomy portfolio for The Times’s new property correspondent, Rachel Kelly. Dissatisfaction with the Government’s health policies continued. In August 1993, the number on NHS waiting lists passed one million. The Scott Report into arms sales to Iraq and the Nolan Report into standards in public life did little to lift the reputation of senior Tories. Sleaze allegations chipped further at their integrity. The Defence Minister, Michael Mates, had to resign over his links with the fugitive businessman Asil Nadir, while several MPs, most prominently Neil Hamilton, were linked to payments from Mohammed Fayed, Harrods’ owner. The sex scandals caused the greatest titillation, in particular David Mellor’s dalliances with a resting actress and the death while engaged in a sex act of a rising star, Stephen Milligan. Collectively, they reduced to ruins Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ campaign which The Times described as his ‘last despairing stab at a big idea’.[19]

The public’s response, towards which no popular newspaper could be indifferent, had become remarkably hostile to the Conservative Party. In the local elections of May 1993, the party was left in control of only one county council. Supposedly safe seats were transformed in by-elections to huge majorities for the Liberal Democrats, further frustrating Major’s ability to retain a Commons majority. A MORI opinion poll in September 1993 suggested that only a third of Times readers supported the Tories. Forty-three per cent of them backed Labour and 20 per cent the Liberal Democrats. The share was not much different in the FT and the Conservatives did not even quite scrape a majority among Telegraph readers. Most alarmingly for Major, his party was down to 22 per cent of Sun readers.[20] The constituency that Margaret Thatcher had put together had been lost.

It was an atmosphere conducive to satire. The television show Spitting Image depicted Major from early on as a grey figure pushing his peas around the plate. It was the Guardian’s Simon Hoggart and its cartoonist, Steve Bell, who established the memorable image of Major with his shirt tucked into a visible pair of Y-fronts. The Times’s cartoonist, Peter Brookes, preferred to depict the Prime Minister as a slightly goofy looking man dominated by a large pair of spectacles. The non-transparent nature of the glasses suggested there was not much of a personality behind them. One who resisted the temptation to kick a man when he was down was the parliamentary sketchwriter, Matthew Parris. Like many ex-Tory MPs, Parris had no love for the Tory Party, although he remained a Conservative by instinct. His sketches were never partisan in the party sense and he got on well with many Labour MPs. Nonetheless, originally a member of the ‘blue chip’ generation of Tory MPs himself, he found it difficult to caricature them with the same ease with which he had got to work with the larger than life figures of the Thatcher years. ‘There I was,’ he later wrote, ‘my gang in power, chronicling their noontide, their late afternoon, their internal mutinies and finally their sunset and night.’ Indeed, Parris was sufficiently close to the Prime Minister to draft a section of his 1994 conference speech, a conflict of journalistic interests that a past editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, had once more controversially performed on behalf of Stanley Baldwin.[21] This was, perhaps, one of the benefits of his decision to remain on a freelance contract. Like John Bryant, Parris regarded Major’s treatment by the press as ‘downright nasty … And I think his dignity and politeness in the face of adversity and mockery were heroic.’[22] If partisanship made him pull the occasional punch in his sketch, then this was perhaps a necessary relief from the unending attack to which the Major Government was prey from almost every other corner of the newspaper. During 1994, opinion polls suggested it was the most unpopular government since polling began.

IV

The Times’s disillusionment with John Major had not been accompanied by any great enthusiasm for John Smith. The leader of the Labour Party and the editor of The Times had little in common. Smith once asked Stothard to join him for a drink in the House of Commons. It was not a success: Stothard was underwhelmed by the Leader of the Opposition ‘pouring half a glass of red wine down his shirt’ at six in the evening.[23] On 12 May 1994, Smith died of a heart attack. It was Tony Blair’s ascendancy that made a difference to the relationship between Labour and The Times. Peter and Sally Stothard had got to know Tony and Cherie Blair in the 1980s when the Blairs bought their Islington house. Happily, the relationship survived this transaction.

Matthew Parris had reacted very differently on his first acquaintance with Blair. Introductions had been arranged in the late 1980s by the Blairs’ new friend, Mary Ann Sieghart, who invited them and Parris for dinner. Parris was less than impressed, finding the MP for Sedgefield strangely hollow, unlike his wife who was the far more substantial personality.[24] This assumption had not changed much by the time Tony Blair emerged to run for the leadership. Watching him make his bid during a speech in Bloomsbury, Parris observed:

Seating in the hall was divided into the three sections eligible to choose the Labour leader: one third BBC, one third print journalists and one third Labour Party … Blair delighted most journalists. His skills would serve in those amusement arcade ‘Grand Prix’ screen games. His own screen, the Autocue screen, and his gaze rigid with concentration, Mr Blair drove at gathering velocity round a track littered with the death-traps of policy commitments, swerving to avoid every one, fuelled by a tank full of abstract nouns.[25]

It was nonetheless a strategy that impressed Stothard. In 1995, Labour delegates were persuaded to remove Clause Four, their party’s historic commitment to state ownership of the means of production. Blair assured them, ‘Today a new Labour Party is being born. Our task now is nothing less than the rebirth of our nation.’ A new start was certainly made with News International. That year, Blair travelled to Australia to speak to the News Corp. seminar on Hayman Island. Considering the Labour Party’s boycott campaign during the Wapping dispute, the occasion was seen as a defining moment in which the symbolism of past disagreements was buried. Blair, indeed, had travelled an awfully long way to prove the point.

Believing in John Major’s depth and Tony Blair’s shallowness, Parris’s view continued to be far more distrustful than the open minded attitude of his editor. His sketch for Blair’s second party conference speech as leader in 1995, noted:

Blair offered the New Testament. Within moments he was quoting Christ. Near the end he declared (twice): ‘Be strong and of good courage.’ The tone was positively messianic. Mr Blair has yet to declare: ‘As God said and rightly …’ but he will.[26]

In May, Parris was called to take tea with Major, who floated the idea of his ‘put up or shut up’ resignation strategy. Parris advised against such an unorthodox move. Unsure whether Major had shared with him the idea in confidence, he chose not to break it in the paper.[27] However, Major duly resigned the party leadership and dared any rival to challenge him. Michael Portillo thought about doing so, but drew back. It was John Redwood, the Welsh Secretary, who left the Cabinet to do so.

Five years earlier, Parris had christened Redwood and Portillo ‘vulcans’ although it was with Redwood that the title stuck, greatly to his personal distress. It was a theme Parris revisited when he turned up for Redwood’s opening press conference only to find himself debarred from entering by organizers who claimed the hall was full. Watching it on television, he reported the scene in his sketch:

Television viewers yesterday watched the first Tory leadership campaign in history to be launched from the bosom of Teresa Gorman. Viewers were startled by the strange green-clad torso behind John Redwood as he spoke at his press conference yesterday. No head was visible in the frame.

I can reveal that it belonged to Mrs Gorman. We would recognise that bust anywhere. Once, as Redwood parried, a hand could be seen tugging at her lapels, drawing them together like green curtains across the cleavage. We trust the hand belonged to Mrs Gorman.

As for the candidate, Parris successfully ridiculed him:

How did he view Wales? ‘It-is-a-beautiful-country,’ said the Vulcan, because that is what Earthlings say about Wales. Instructed by his minders to display humour, Redwood told us he was a ‘jobseeker.’ He followed this with the smile he has now learnt to do very nicely: a triumph of muscular control … What, we wondered, would be his final word?

‘No extra charge!’ he declared. Mr Redwood must have seen this in a supermarket, recorded it as a useful idiomatic phrase, and inputted it onto the wrong disk-drive in his logic system.[28]

When his colleagues voted on 4 July 1995, Major defeated his challenger by a sufficient although, in the circumstances, hardly crushing manner. Redwood received eighty-nine votes and there were twenty abstentions.

Meanwhile, Conrad Black replaced Max Hastings with the more firmly anti-Major Charles Moore as editor of the Daily Telegraph. This was followed by a raid on The Times for some of its best staff. Anne McElvoy was inveigled away to the Spectator and Matthew D’Ancona was poached by the Sunday Telegraph. D’Ancona’s departure did not alter The Times’s hostility to the Government, but it did raise the possibility that it would mix a right wing attack on its European policies with a Blairite attack on domestic issues. Mary Ann Sieghart was proving to be an articulate and forceful advocate of Blair’s ‘third way’. As the only senior Times leader writer who knew Tony Blair well, she was able to speak authoritatively on his agenda without risk of contradiction. The chief leader writer, Rosemary Righter, disagreed with her, but because her own speciality was foreign policy she was keen to find a strong intellectual who could shoreup the paper’s defences against falling for Blair’s charms. The answer came in the guise of D’Ancona’s friend and Oxford contemporary, Michael Gove. An Aberdonian, Gove had attended Robert Gordon’s College, a regular feature in the surprisingly intense world of Scottish schools debating contests. Proceeding up to Lady Margaret Hall, he had been elected president of the Oxford Union. To Gove, journalism was the natural means of keeping his formidable debating skills in fine fettle. Like Stothard, another minor independent schoolboy and Oxford graduate, he had worked at the BBC (on the Today and On The Record programmes) and was looking to escape into print journalism. Believing that he had identified the next leader of the Conservative Party, he had also begun writing a biography called Michael Portillo: The Future of the Right. When The Times considered serialization, Gove met and made a favourable impression on Martin Ivens. In January 1996, he was duly appointed a leader writer, at the age of twenty-eight. A few months later, the leader team was strengthened further with the arrival of Tim Hames, an Oxford don of light blue hue who would also come to play a prime role in the paper’s political positioning. Daniel Johnson was moved from the literary editorship over to become comment editor. These changes stalled, at least for the moment, the prospect of The Times falling for the charms of Tony Blair.

In fact, the dynamics of Stothard’s inner circle were complicated. Michael Gove and Mary Ann Sieghart were both Euro-sceptics and, for the most part, social liberals. Yet the former was a trenchant Tory, committed to maintaining the Act of Union with Scotland and Ulster and man of evangelical convictions, while the latter was an equally strong advocate of New Labour who had a personal rapport with the Blairs. Daniel Johnson provided a more traditional voice of social and religious Conservatism. Like Bernard Levin before him, Anatole Kaletsky had a sparkling mind and prevented leader conferences from proceeding along conventional lines by the elasticity of his thinking. On foreign policy, Rosemary Righter combined an uncompromising neo-conservative world view with a strong belief in the principles of the United Nations (thus ensuring she was often highly critical of the UN in practice). Michael Binyon, on the other hand, was relied upon to represent the unflappable perspective of the Foreign Office and was, alone among the group, noticeably less hostile to the causes of Brussels and the Palestinians. During previous editorships, Stothard had watched ‘a lot of aggression take place in and around the leader department’ yet among his own college of cardinals he recognized that ‘the general spirit was exceptionally good. They were very fine representatives of their causes, all good humoured, good hearted people’ despite the daily ding-dongs that took place between them.[29]

The political commentator least amenable to the attractions offered by either of the main parties was, perhaps, the cartoonist, Peter Brookes. Having studied at London’s Central School of Art and Design, Brookes was an expert draughtsman whose rare achievement was an ability to parody his subject matter while still drawing them with great accuracy and attention to detail. He began at The Times in 1981 as an illustrator to the main columnists on the Op-Ed page. After a while, he concluded it would be more satisfying to conjure up his own commentaries rather than, for example, reproduce Bernard Levin’s views in visual form. From 1993, he became the paper’s political cartoonist. His method was to arrive at the office in good time for the morning conference when the main news stories were discussed. He would then spend the rest of the morning and early afternoon toying with ideas in pencil. Once he had decided on his cartoon, usually by about 4.30 p.m., he had a couple of hours to translate it onto paper in pen and ink before the page was ready to go to press. For the Saturday edition, he added his box of watercolours in order to produce ‘Nature Notes’. This was a weekly bestiary that depicted public figures as animals, annotated with informative behavioural notes. Eventually, colour came to the Op-Ed page as well, specifically so that the daily Brookes cartoon could be unveiled in the best of lights. Neither Tory, nor Euro-sceptic, nor taken in by the blandishments of New Labour, his political prejudices were often far removed from those emanating from the editor’s office and this helped create an important ideological counterpoise in the heart of the paper. His real achievement, though, was the piquant wit he brought to contemporary events. While the quality of his artistry was without equal, it was always the idea he was conveying that was the central component of his success.

As colleagues reassembled at Times House in the New Year – an election year – Stothard was musing about the implications of change. Did this mean he would take The Times where it had never gone before by endorsing the Labour Party? He gathered the leader writers and senior political staff for a private meeting in the Reform Club where the options were laid before them. It was Stothard’s technique in leader conferences to set up opposing views and watch the two antipathetic sides battle it out to a conclusion. The same format was deployed at the Reform Club. Michael Gove made the case for endorsing the Tories and Mary Ann Sieghart did likewise for Labour. Gove maintained that what was at the core of Blair’s programme was constitutional reform and this, unlike issues of funding and provision, was so revolutionary that it could not be undone five years later if The Times did not like the consequences. As a Scottish Unionist, Gove was deeply uneasy about Labour’s plans for devolution within the British Isles but he was especially concerned about the likelihood of being taken into the euro and a far deeper form of integration than even Major was prepared to stomach. Blair’s plans were irreversible and bad. Furthermore, Gove questioned whether the modernizers were really in control? He doubted that a Cabinet containing Frank Dobson and Margaret Beckett in key portfolios was likely to think the unthinkable in reforming the welfare state. Sieghart took a different line. She too was averse to taking Britain into a European single currency, but Blair would hold a referendum on that issue so it was not a defining issue for how people should vote at the general election. The Times, she argued, had set Blair a number of hurdles that he – and more importantly his party – would have to cross on issues like the unions and education before they could be endorsed. These hurdles had been very impressively cleared. Given how far Labour had come and the distance the Tories had slipped, she maintained that the question of whether the paper endorsed Labour was ‘if not now, then when?’. The meeting broke up with no final decision taken. Unusually for an ambitious and sharp-witted young Tory, Gove was a man of generous spirit and unfailing old-fashioned courtesy. He thought that Sieghart had possibly ‘won on points.’[30]

The decision lay with the editor and with him alone. He recognized that the Conservatives had run out of steam. Yet, given the limited practical programme set out by Tony Blair – albeit accompanied by much evangelical rhetoric – the Tories certainly seemed to have as much to offer a new parliamentary term as New Labour in terms of proposals for domestic reform. Instead, it was the issue of Europe that remained at the forefront of Stothard’s mind. He might have been more inclined to overlook Blair’s enthusiasm for Brussels if he had known that once Gordon Brown became Chancellor he would kick the euro issue into touch for the next two parliaments. This, however, was far from clear in the first months of 1997. A Labour victory, it seemed, was the surest way of bringing about a referendum to join the euro within the lifetime of the next parliament. It would be a campaign in which the Government, the most well-known and popular Tory politicians and the Liberal Democrats would all be campaigning for a ‘yes’ vote. The prospect filled him with as much woe as it did Michael Gove. On the other hand, the other principal issue vexing the editor was not one of policy but of personality. With Michael Howard and Peter Lilley he was on good terms, but he had a shortage of respect that bordered on contempt for John Major. Bumping into the Prime Minister in Australia House shortly before Christmas in 1996, Stothard had told him that The Times was about to bring him some good news with an opinion poll that suggested he had gained some ground against Labour. ‘For me personally or for the party?’ was Major’s instant reply.[31] Such comments made Stothard despair. He was also staggered when Lady Thatcher assured him that ‘Tony Blair is a man who won’t let Britain down’.[32] In any case, having very effectively given the impression he thought the Prime Minister lacked the intellectual rigour to hold the office, he could hardly clear his throat and endorse him for a further five years of political purgatory.

On 17 March, Major announced there would be a general election on 1 May. He had put off the date until the last moment, hoping that the improving economic climate would demonstrate the Tories were not economically incompetent after all. Stothard had still given no indication as to which way his mind was made up between Labour and Conservative, yet there was an alternative that gave him a way out of his dilemma. The businessman and millionaire Sir James Goldsmith had founded the Referendum Party. Its specific aim was expressed in its title, but it was unapologetically a party campaigning against Britain being swept up into the integrationist impulses of the European Union. Around Goldsmith, a group of youthful, right-wing enthusiasts had constellated, as had a few more glamorous figures, drawn in part by the leader’s charisma and wealth. For its part, most of the mainstream media regarded Goldsmith with a mixture of fear and loathing. Stothard did not share this aversion and Goldsmith paid a couple of visits to Times House in the run up to polling day. The editor even got Gove to write a profile of Goldsmith, specifically requesting that it should not be the hatchet job that others had done when entrusted with the task. Gove opted to suggest that ‘it would be more dignified for Sir James to claim an intellectual victory now than to endure an electoral massacre this spring’. Gove particularly resented Goldsmith’s intention to field candidates even against MPs with strong Euro-sceptic track records.[33] Nobody who knew Stothard imagined that he would do anything as eccentric as committing The Times to the maverick pronouncements of the Anglo-French multimillionaire but it was a sign that he was open to unorthodox thinking as election day drew near. It was Hywell Williams, John Redwood’s adviser, who suggested that since the editor clearly thought Britain’s relations with the EU was the most important issue facing the country, The Times should fight it as a ‘coupon election’ – endorsing those candidates of whatever party had a history of opposing further integration in general and the euro in particular. Meanwhile, Stothard asked the archives to send up all the paper’s twentieth-century general election endorsements. He read them and passed them onto Tim Hames, asking for his historical insight, adding implausibly by way of explanation, ‘the twentieth century is not really my period’.[34]

Accompanied by the acclaimed watercolourist Matthew Cook to record the scene, Stothard, Riddell and Kaletsky arrived at 10 Downing Street for their pre-polling day interview with the Prime Minister. In the full-page write-up for the paper by Stothard, Europe appeared to have been the only issue that intruded upon the discussion, save for an almost throwaway sentence, ‘he sees the achievement of low inflation as essentially his own, the top item in the ledger of his achievements’.[35] Despite repeated interrogation from Kaletsky, Major nonetheless refused to say what his gut feeling was towards joining the euro, explaining ‘what I will do is what I happen to think is in the best interests of the country. It may not actually be what my innate instincts might be. I don’t know what judgment I am going to reach.’ Major was in a difficult position. If he ruled out joining the euro in the lifetime of the next parliamentary term he would retain – or perhaps regain – the loyalty of two-thirds of his party. Yet, if he pursued this course, he risked losing the support of those Cabinet ministers he actually liked and, in particular, the two most senior members of his government, Michael Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke. It was an unenviable choice, but adopting a wait and see policy gave the impression that the Prime Minister did not have the strength of character to tell his own party whether he actually had an opinion on one of the biggest issues in the economic and political life of the nation – scrapping the national currency and surrendering ultimate budgetary control via the stability pact to the European Union. His equivocation only sharpened the contempt in which his critics at The Times – and elsewhere – held him. It was certainly not a display of leadership and, given the discord it was fuelling, some frankly had come to wonder if it was even an effective course of party management.

This last point was thrown into focus when Tory MPs started disavowing their leader’s wait and see (it had been rechristened ‘negotiate and decide’) policy. Major responded to demands for clarity with the desperate appeal, ‘don’t bind my hands’. Stothard made up his mind, deciding, in the words of a subsequent leading article drafted by Michael Gove, that, ‘The party machines do not wish to be bound, but the voters should not have to choose blind.’[36] With only six days to go before polling day, Stothard told Gove what was afoot, entrusting him with leading a small team to draw up within forty-eight hours a comprehensive list of who the Euro-sceptic candidates were. This was a tall order that involved much delving into reference sources and checking on pressure group affiliations. Among the inducements for pro-Europeans to use vaguely Euro-sceptical language in their campaign literature was the prospect of money from the businessman Paul Sykes to help Euro-sceptic candidates’ campaign expenses. Gove’s team were not prepared to endorse anyone who deployed weasel words like being unable to ‘foresee’ adopting the euro. Discovering Labour candidates’ views on the matter was even more difficult because few cared to deviate from the line of obfuscation being encouraged from their party’s headquarters at Millbank. Nonetheless, on Monday 28 April – four days before election day – The Times published its list of the candidates it endorsed. The two-page spread was framed by a Richard Willson cartoon depicting a Bayeaux tapestry-style montage with the heads of the leading politicians superimposed on the figures. So that the Euro-enthusiasts could be depicted as being under attack and Major subjected to an arrow in his eye, it was the Euro-sceptics who, oddly, were the Norman cavalry.

The Times decided to list not only those candidates it considered Euro-sceptic but also those with firmly Europhile records, ‘whom sceptical voters should not support’. Where a Europhile Tory was being challenged by a candidate from the pro-euro Liberal Democrats, The Times advocated voting for the latter on the grounds that ‘the Commons will be just as Europhile whether the Tory or Liberal Democrat candidate wins, but if the Tory loses the Tory party as a whole will become more sceptical’.[37] There were also some exceptions. The Times refused to endorse Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams or the Tory Neil Hamilton, who was at the centre of the much-publicized fight over allegations that he took cash for questions. The Europhile Tam Dalyell was endorsed on the grounds that he was opposed to devolution for Scotland. Inevitably there was a flurry of telephone calls from anxious Tory candidates keen to protest their Euro-sceptic credentials in order to be added to the list. ‘If I lose, you’ll have a hand in it,’ warned the candidate for Hampstead and Highgate while another, soon to be former, MP, hollered down the telephone, ‘This is a scandal: you could cost me the election.’[38] Some injustices were done, although in other cases it appeared that it was only the prospect of being hanged that concentrated a candidate’s mind.

Endorsing candidates according to their view on the great issue of the day rather than the party they represented was a complete break from past custom. It did, however, solve Stothard’s problem over feeling unable to endorse the Conservatives but reticent to declare for the untested and euro-friendly Blair. Some thought The Times had made a serious misjudgment. They questioned whether Europe was an issue that trumped all others. The opinion polls certainly suggested it was bread and butter issues that would determine the result. The Times had embarked upon a policy where it found itself endorsing far left Labour candidates like Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Benn with whom it had nothing else in common but an aversion to Brussels. Indeed many of the left-wingers the paper endorsed opposed joining the single currency on the sort of anti-capitalist economic arguments that were anathema to the paper’s general outlook. Furthermore, the leading column was also highlighting the cause of specific candidates – usually in marginal seats – who it felt deserved to be elected on account of their contribution to public life. These included politicians like the Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes who supported the euro. Critics were not shy in pointing out these glaring inconsistencies. It came to overshadow the considerable work the paper had made to highlight the other aspects of the general election campaign. The Times was the only newspaper to publish the major parties’ manifestos in full. Indeed, Stothard later suggested, ‘Endorsement is not the main point.’ What Labour had been far more interested in was having their policies given ‘a fair crack of the whip’ in the news pages and across the paper generally. This The Times provided.[39]

Nonetheless, the decision of The Times to endorse a platform rather than a party took the paper’s journalists by surprise. It was the editor’s decision alone and was not debated at any leader conference. Mary Ann Sieghart was particularly bewildered, having believed Labour was about to be endorsed. She promptly did some moonlighting for the News of the World, helping to write its leader column endorsing Blair.[40] On Tuesday 29 April, The Times’s decision ran across the top of the front page and was elaborated upon in a full-page leading article written by the editor. It contained a note of historical self-justification that sought to minimize accusations that the paper was breaking with tradition. In the early years of the twentieth century, the paper had put aside its Liberal instincts in order to defend the causes of the Empire and opposition to Irish Home Rule. It had not taken a hard line in the 1945 election and had been neutral in 1955. Thereafter its Tory endorsements had been accompanied by a plea to shore up the Liberal Party. ‘Our strong support of Lady Thatcher in the 1980s was, in this regard, counter to our traditions, not central to them,’ it assured readers. While the paper had admired strong leaders, ‘John Major, by contrast, has been a true man of his parliamentary machine. His skills are those of the whip. His proudest boasts have been for his powers of negotiation.’ In contrast, there was much to commend Blair who had acted quickly to re-educate his party, ‘but we do not put our name to what is still a tower of dreams’.[41]

Murdoch was as much taken by surprise as everybody else. Indeed, the division of opinion within his newspaper empire hardly gave credence to the common orthodoxy that News International’s owner pulled the political strings. The Sunday Times reluctantly endorsed the Conservatives while the Sun, rather more confidently, proclaimed the case for Labour. The line adopted by The Times appeared eccentric or unashamedly individualist, according to taste. Yet, even though Murdoch privately thought the Euro-sceptic endorsement was a mistake,[42] he did not attempt to dissuade Stothard nor did he use the broadly unfavourable backlash following the paper’s pronouncement to undermine him. Indeed, it would have been hard to find a more politically ‘hands-off’ proprietor in all Fleet Street. Conrad Black’s Daily Telegraph was the only daily broadsheet to declare for the Tories. The Times’s columnists went their separate ways. Accusing Major of ‘pathetically ineffectual leadership’, Kaletsky described his government as ‘the least electable in 50 years’.[43] Rees-Mogg cast around for reasons to vote Conservative, arguing that having been promised a free vote on the euro, a Tory majority would ensure a euro-sceptic parliament.[44] Woodrow Wyatt argued that the polls could be wrong, that many old socialists would abstain rather than vote for Blair and that ‘against all the pollsters, and chumps like the pornographic bestseller and disloyal Edwina Currie … I believe that John Major, who has fought brilliantly, is on course for a majority of around 30–40’.[45] Eschewing the rancour that so many felt for the collapsing regime, Simon Jenkins wrote a notably fair-minded piece on election eve, noting ‘there is no greater compliment to the Thatcher – Major era than the thinness of today’s Labour manifesto’.[46]

On election morning, The Times’s MORI poll suggested Labour would get 48 per cent and the Tories 28 per cent with the Liberal Democrats on 16, suggesting a Labour majority of between 180 and 200. In the event, the respective percentages were 44, 31 and 17 and the majority was 177. ‘Landslide victory for Labour’ ran The Times’s headline once most of the results were in, below an architrave of Tory portraits – Portillo, Lang, Forsyth, Rumbold, Hamilton, Mellor, Waldegrave, Rifkind, Lamont – each looking dejected, each with the caption ‘OUT’ splashed across the top. Five Cabinet ministers and eighteen other ministers lost their seats. The Conservative Party, which had gone into the election committed to preserving the United Kingdom against Blair’s plans for devolution, was left with no MPs outside England.

What was particularly embarrassing for The Times was that the landslide predominantly swept away Tory Euro-sceptics, leaving Euro-friendly chieftains like Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine untouched. There was little evidence that voters had actively endorsed Europhile candidates, merely that they had treated it as a traditional general election fought on party lines and domestic issues, and not as a surrogate referendum on deeper European integration. In this mood, the vast majority of Times readers simply ignored their paper’s appeal. If the Euro-sceptic voters’ guide had any effect then, perhaps, it assisted some in identifying a like-minded candidate from one of the main parties in their constituency, thereby redirecting some protest votes away from Goldsmith’s Referendum Party or the UK Independence Party (both of which performed below expectations in the ballot). How many – if any – MPs owed success to this assault on the fringe vote may be contested. At any rate, it had no bearing on the overall result. This was a humiliating rebuff to The Times’s editorial stance – not that this consequence was dwelt upon in the leading column whose attention seamlessly switched to the prospects for the new administration. It was a demonstration of how impotent the press could be once the public had already made its mind up on a subject. ‘If I could rewrite the traditions of the paper, I would not endorse’ at general elections was Stothard’s subsequent reflection.[47]

V

The end of eighteen years of Tory rule and the prospects for a new style of government under a young, fresh faced Prime Minister who talked the language of hope and rebirth would now become the focus for The Times. Yet not to be overlooked was the relative success of the third party. With forty-six MPs, the Liberal Democrats had produced their best result since Lloyd George’s Liberal Party went to the polls promising a Keynesian-style New Deal in 1929. The other, more pressing matter concerned how the Conservatives – whose share of the vote had not been so low since they were led by the Duke of Wellington in 1832 – would regroup. Major immediately announced his intention to stand down, sensibly opting to spend his first day of freedom watching cricket at The Oval. It was the cue for a bloody leadership fight to commence. Matthew Parris was perturbed that ‘the party I used to respect’ had been gripped by ‘some sort of fever’ that was turning it away from being led by ‘grown ups’ who challenged Labour for the middle ground, preferring to become a sort of ‘Tory Likud’ that instead aimed at predominance on the fringe. The notion that they might find salvation under John Redwood’s leadership was, Parris wrote, ‘laughable’ although it was clear he saw nothing amusing about the prospect.[48] The leading column, however, leapt to pour cold water on Clarke or Heseltine’s claims to the succession, positing that they were ‘deeply associated with the election debacle’.[49] Having argued that the issue of Europe was the determining factor in the general election, the paper could hardly demand a Europhile victory in the ensuing leadership contest. Portillo, who Michael Gove had tipped as the next leader, had been removed from the contest by his own electors in Enfield Southgate. On 3 May, Heseltine’s aspirations were felled by a heart scare that dispatched him to hospital. Within days, John Redwood had entered the leadership race with an article in The Times entitled ‘I can’t defend the past; I can unite the party’ in which he maintained that having resigned from the Major Cabinet he was the only candidate who would not have to spend the next few years apologizing for it.[50] In fact, it was Redwood’s decision to resign from the Cabinet in 1995 that created an opportunity for a young man of promise, William Hague, to fill Redwood’s shoes at the Welsh Office and, in doing so, enter the 1997 election as a candidate with Cabinet experience. Even on the morning after the general election disaster, Andrew Pierce had written up Hague as the leader the Tories might turn to in order to ‘skip a generation’. This initially improbable prospect suddenly took hold. Having originally made a verbal agreement to back Michael Howard by standing as his deputy (and, in effect, heir apparent) Hague soon began to believe he could win under his own steam. Howard’s hopes were dealt a further blow by the outspoken maverick Ann Widdecombe, who attacked him over his sacking of the prison chief, Derek Lewis, and announced to a stunned Commons chamber that there was ‘something of the night’ about the former Home Secretary.

The scale of the election landslide naturally encouraged some to think the Tories needed a complete reinvention. Coming from a younger generation, Hague’s profile appeared perfect for this role. Yet, in urging the party to elect Ken Clarke as their leader, Simon Jenkins pointed out that there was no need to assume that the Tories would be out of office for a generation. On the contrary, although exaggerated in seats secured by the vagaries of the electoral system, Blair had actually won only 1 per cent more of the popular vote than had Major in 1992. The gap was thus by no means unbridgeable within the space of one parliamentary term of office. Jenkins was baffled by the defeatism of Tory MPs who were ‘behaving as if they lost the argument as well as the election. They did not. They won the argument, which is why they lost the election … New Labour is one of the Tory party’s great achievements.’[51] After Howard and Lilley trailed in the first ballot of MPs, Redwood and Clarke agreed to work together to dish Hague. The decision astounded Westminster and its lobby correspondents. References to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact abounded. ‘We can say a sad farewell to John Redwood as a valid figure in Conservative policies,’ wrote Rees-Mogg. ‘He was the Robespierre of the Right, the dark-blue Incorruptible … In the twinkling of an eye he has destroyed himself.’[52] ‘Absurd is how the axis between Mr Clarke and Mr Redwood will look to the country and absurd is what it is,’ huffed the leading article.[53] Lady Thatcher felt likewise, and endorsed William Hague. The following day, he romped to victory by 92 votes to 70. Aged thirty-six, he was the youngest Tory leader since William Pitt the Younger (of whom he later became a biographer) two hundred years before.

Few, including The Times which backed him, knew where Hague intended to take the party. All that was known for sure was that he was young, fresh, virtually untainted by the infighting of the Major years and, unlike Clarke, was no enthusiast for joining the euro. In the circumstances, this appeared to be a promising start. If he lacked stature then he had time, it seemed, to acquire it and develop some new policies along the way. Yet, escaping the shadows of the past five years of infighting and ‘Tory sleaze’ remained a daunting prospect. The day after Hague was elected leader, Jonathan Aitken’s libel case against the Guardian collapsed. Having been prepared to let his daughter Victoria provide him with a false alibi under oath, the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury faced charges of perjury and perverting the course of justice for which he would serve seven months in jail and be declared bankrupt. There were heavy clouds hanging over the bright Tory dawn. The Times was ready to look out towards a different horizon.

CHAPTER TWELVE

NEW LABOUR, NEW JOURNALISM

Living with New Labour; Devolution in Print and in Politics;

the People’s Princess; Bernard Levin Takes His Bow; Pennington Street;

Media Law, the PCC and Libel; China Calling; the Ashcroft Affair;

the Editor Takes Time Out; T2; the Shine Comes off the Spin;

Labour Endorsed

I

‘Tony Blair will have to be a great Prime Minister if he is not to be a great failure’ wrote Rees-Mogg the day after the general election.[1] The first weeks certainly promised that the new leader would live up to the high expectations created by a landslide that gave him untrammelled political authority. Six days after the election victory, Gordon Brown, Blair’s new next-door neighbour as Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced the first surprise: handing interest-rate policy over to an independent Bank of England. Socialists wondered why such an immediate and momentous change had not been included in the election manifesto and, indeed, why one of the first actions of a Labour Government after eighteen years in opposition was to denationalize an instrument of economic management. The Times was delighted. An independent central bank was a precondition of joining the euro but the move also weakened one of the single currency supporters’ stronger arguments – that British governments had long debauched sterling for short-term political ends. Whatever his feelings about the single currency, Brown had shown himself to be a decisive Chancellor in pursuit of a liberalizing policy that even the Tories had lacked the courage of their convictions to enact.

Brown had the latitude of benign conditions in which to operate. During the summer of 1997, inflation stood at only 3.3 per cent while unemployment, at 1.55 million (5.5 per cent of the workforce), was far below the average on the European continent. This rosy economic prospect had been assisted by the legacy of the Tory reforms that removed rigidities in the labour market, reducing costs to employers of hiring – and firing – staff. Yet the easy employment prospects for the vast majority were matched by pockets of persistent unemployment for a few, who, having been jobless for long periods, had difficulty getting back onto the ladder of opportunity. The Blair Government’s ‘New Deal’ programme was designed to offer a training scheme from which they could get back into work, paid for by a – politically opportunistic – windfall tax on the profits earned by the privatized utilities whose very success had become as much a source of public anger as had their previous losses and ineptitude as wards of the State.

For The Times’s political strategists the most momentous decision came on 27 October when, after mounting speculation, Brown informed the Commons chamber that Britain would not join the euro in the current parliament but would hope to do so in the following one. For Stothard, this was a huge relief. The prospect of Blair using the momentum of his election landslide to roll the country into precipitously scrapping sterling had subsided entirely. What happened in a subsequent parliament remained a distant prospect. In the event, Brown (or the failure of the opinion polls to show mounting popular enthusiasm) ensured that Britain would stay out of the euro during Labour’s second term too. When eleven members of the European Union welcomed in 1999 with the new currency, Britain would not be among them. The great moment in European unity was marked by fireworks in the sky rather than by a crisis at the shopping tills or money markets. The widespread disorder that some Euro-sceptics’ prophesied failed to materialize and the new currency’s adoption had an impressively tranquil passage in the period of transition. Yet, the pro-euro campaigners’ assertions that a Britain outside the euro zone would suffer from foreign investors deserting its shores and the City of London losing its primacy similarly proved to be scares without foundation. Equally adrift was their claim that a single currency would have an anti-inflationary effect by making price differentials transparent across the Continent. In fact, the new currency provided an opportunity to round prices upwards. Indeed, in the first years of operation the economies of the euro zone – and in particular of a Germany buckling under the costs of reunification and an expensive labour market – were outperformed by a Britain left to the protection of its own currency. Continuing economic growth buttressed Labour’s claims to competence and popularity with the electorate. It frustrated the Prime Minister’s attempts to convince the Chancellor or the general public of the urgency of joining the euro bloc.

II

The announcement in October 1997 that Britain would not – for the moment at any rate – boldly go into the euro zone came a month after the new Government had recast the political structure of the United Kingdom. On 12 September, 74.3 per cent of Scots voted in a referendum for their own Parliament with 63.5 per cent assenting that it should have tax-raising powers. In Wales seven days later the vote for a more modest assembly without the power to tax was won by the unconvincing margin of 0.6 per cent (a mere 6721 votes). Meanwhile, a post-general election ceasefire by the IRA was deemed sufficient to bring Sinn Fein into talks over Ulster’s future, raising expectations that a political settlement could yet be achieved on the basis of a power-sharing assembly at Stormont. Following in quick succession, these developments, taken together with plans to abolish the hereditary element within the House of Lords, appeared to be signs of a new radicalism in British politics, in which Blair dedicated his service to the reform and modernization of the constitutional settlement.

The irony was that Blair appeared to be less excited by the reform agenda than many of his colleagues. In particular, the establishment of a Scottish Parliament created a rival power structure to the centralization of authority he appeared to believe was necessary to create the ‘New Britain’ of which he so frequently, and ambiguously, spoke. He had inherited the Scottish devolution agenda from his predecessor, John Smith, and during the election campaign had committed a rare and inexplicable gaff by insisting it would be little more than a parish council. When Stothard, accompanied by Peter Riddell and Anatole Kaletsky, had interviewed Blair in the last hours before polling day, the Labour leader denied that his constitutional proposals would be his greatest legacy, claiming ‘the improvements in education will be much more important than that’.[2] There were those at Wapping who begged to differ. Given the scale of Blair’s majority and the period of introspection it forced upon the official Opposition, George Brock assumed that ‘the only interesting politics over the next few years will be in Scotland’.[3] The question underlying the managing editor’s prophecy was how a London paper like The Times could make itself attractive to a Scottish readership whose lives would increasingly be determined by a legislature meeting in Edinburgh.

The situation had been bad enough even before the first workmen arrived on the Holyrood site to build Scotland’s own Parliament building. Scots had long preferred their own broadsheet newspapers – in particular the Glasgow Herald and the Scotsman – to the clipped accents from distant Fleet Street. Sales of The Times north of the border were pitiful. As with the sale in Ireland, they numbered only a few thousand during the 1980s although circulation began to pick up after 1993 with the commencement of the price war. Part of this long tradition of failure could be laid at the door of the paper being perceived not merely as an English product but one too closely associated with the closed world of Whitehall, the Establishment and the affairs of the Church of England’s General Synod. A decade of ownership by Murdoch or even five years with Charlie Wilson at the helm had failed substantially to shift this perception. In truth, it was not just a matter of anti-Home Counties resentment. Middle-class Scots in Edinburgh’s New Town or Morningside had their own professional hierarchy as might be expected in the capital of a nation that had always retained its own legal and ecclesiastical sovereignty. Political devolution now threatened to make The Times even more redundant north of Berwick-upon-Tweed. After all, Scots could hardly be expected to want a product that focused on issues of domestic policy that were no longer applicable to them while being denied more than occasional references to the laws that did affect them from Holyrood.

A fleeting examination of the balance books suggested the Scottish market could be written off, yet this made no sense for a newspaper that considered itself a British product committed to the maintenance of the Act of Union. Furthermore, Scotland clearly had a readership profile that indicated there were converts to be won if only a London paper could speak to them in a broader brogue. Merely adding a few extra Scottish news items would not address this: they would never be enough for noncurrent readers to notice and turn to the paper. What was needed was a distinct Scottish edition. This involved considerable investment but, as the process of Scottish devolution got underway, Stothard and Brock drew up plans for just such an innovation. It would not be a completely new paper for certain features, like the comment, leaders, letters and obituaries pages, would remain standard on both sides of the border, but a new Scottish editor would be appointed to oversee the replacement of those news items that would have little resonance with Scottish readers with stories that were relevant to them. The sports pages could also be altered to provide fuller coverage of Scottish teams and individuals. Once it was launched, Scottish readers of this edition would get the best of both worlds – a full portrait of Scottish news combined with all the aspects that made The Times the sort of journal of world news against which the Herald or the Scotsman could never field the resources to compete.

It was a far more complicated process than at first it appeared. Subediting a Scottish edition did not simply involve cutting out news about Eton and pasting in a tale about Fettes. The fact that health and education politics had passed to the Holyrood Parliament’s competence did not preclude the possibility that patients in the Edinburgh Infirmary might still want to know about health policies that governed the wards of Guy’s Hospital. Likewise, it was important that the Scotland edition did not become a sink estate for Scottish news to be tidied away from English eyes. The Home Counties were generously populated by parents with offspring up at Scottish universities. What was clearly needed was a Scottish editor with an eye for getting the balance right and such a man was found in John Mair. Born in the small clifftop fishing village of Portknockie, east of Inverness, Mair, an Aberdeen University graduate and a discerning lover of poetry, had joined The Times as a production sub in 1981 and spent the succeeding seventeen years taking increasing responsibility on the backbench, where he became deputy night editor. Assisted by a single sub, he would, as the new Scottish editor, continue to be based at Wapping. This was necessary for ease of access to Stothard and the rest of the editorial high command including those, like Michael Gove, who had a good grasp of Celtic affairs. The actual reporting, however, would be done from the paper’s Edinburgh office, from where Jason Allardyce and Gillian Harris operated, supplemented by Shirley English in Glasgow.

Effective coverage of the Holyrood Parliament would be the most important division between the Scottish and English editions. For north of the border, Angus Macleod was appointed political editor. Aside from its committee work, the new Parliament had full sessions in the chamber on Wednesdays and Thursdays and Magnus Linklater – who had been a Times columnist since 1994 – became the sketchwriter for these occasions. As the son of Eric Linklater, the Orcadian-born biographer, soldier and comic novelist, he had a natural sense of place within the Scottish cultural Establishment although, as an Old Etonian, graduate of the universities of Freiburg, the Sorbonne and Cambridge and a member of the MCC, his attachment to the principle of Scottish devolution came with none of the anti-Sassenach baggage that sometimes accompanied the more strident exponents of Scottish exceptionalism. In any case, he had spent most of his journalistic career in London where he had worked with Harold Evans at the Sunday Times before moving over to become successively managing editor of the Observer and editor of the London Daily News. It was only with the collapse of Maxwell’s attempt to take on the Evening Standard that he moved up to Edinburgh as editor of the Scotsman between 1988 and 1994. Writing from his Georgian residence in the heart of Edinburgh’s New Town, Linklater was one of nature’s true-born Whigs. He was a man of liberal and humane sentiments who combined his journalism with a love of opera, fishing and antiquarian bookshops. He wished the Holyrood venture well without feeling obliged to ignore its shortcomings – except in the matter of the new Parliament’s construction costs, which he defended, confident in the belief that it would prove to be an architectural wonder capable of comparison with the Sydney Opera House. While his Holyrood sketches only appeared in the Scottish edition, his weekly column – usually on matters emanating from Scotland’s political adventure – appeared in the English editions as well. Like Brock, Stothard took the view that the Holyrood experiment was too interesting a development to be confined to a Scots only audience.

The editions going north began to be re-edited with additional Scottish content in late 1998. Going to press at 6 a.m., the edition for 7 May 1999 carried the full results of the new Parliament’s first elections as the frontpage lead. A formally distinctive and branded Scottish edition hit the newsstands on 22 July. The first task was to make the best of a logistical problem. Increasing sales of the Sun (which already had a Scottish edition) had swamped any spare capacity at News International’s Kinning Park printing plant in Glasgow. Consequently, the new Times paper had to be printed from the company’s Knowsley plant in Merseyside. This created some difficulty for the first print run which went up to the north of Scotland without some of the late-starting Scottish sporting fixtures, although the second edition – which covered the vast majority of the readership in the ‘central belt’ – left late enough to provide a comprehensive service. Certainly, the product looked as professional as its English counterpart and, on average, contained only around six to twelve article alternations a day. Yet, judiciously selected, these were enough to satiate the target market – those Scots who wanted more home news within a newspaper that was still primarily British in tone and international in scope. Improvements continued to be made. In 2001, some of the more obscure London arts reviews were replaced with reports from Robert Dawson-Scott on what was showing in Scotland’s galleries and theatres. Helped by a special price cut, the effect on circulation north of the border was dramatic. The Times saw its Scottish sale soar and by 2000 its circulation had passed the thirty thousand mark. The Telegraph also launched a Scottish edition along similar lines and recorded comparable gains. Nonetheless, by 2002 The Times had opened up a six-thousand-lead over its rival and had become comfortably Scotland’s leading Fleet Street broadsheet. Perhaps surprisingly, the Independent and the Guardian (which might have expected a ready market in a part of the country whose employment patterns and politics favoured a strong public sector) opted only to increase the Scottish content in the editions they sent north rather than to follow The Times and Telegraph’s path of a full-blown Scottish edition. Their continuing failure to make headway in Scotland suggested they had missed their chance. In contrast, for a paper whose politics remained unionist, The Times had demonstrated great versatility in adapting to the new landscape created by Scottish devolution. It was a costly endeavour but it reaped an important dividend.

III

Within weeks of taking office, Tony Blair had shown his faith in the future (whatever it might hold) by giving the go-ahead to the £750 million Millennium Dome, a project that it was hoped would embody everything positive and progressive about what style journalists had taken to calling ‘Cool Britannia’. In July 1997, a party hosted in Downing Street for some of the brightest and most recognizable figures in the arts was widely interpreted as a Prime Ministerial attempt to associate himself with the new mood of optimism that sought to be unencumbered with the weight of tradition and history. It was not just post-election triumphalism that gave the Labour Government a sense that 1997 was a year of renewal. On 30 June the story of the British Empire effectively came to a close in Hong Kong when, in a ceremony no less moving for being rain-drenched, the Prime Minister and the Prince of Wales attended the handover of the last significant colony to the People’s Republic of China. In The Times, a poignant leader article saluted Britain’s record there but questioned whether it was living up to its responsibilities for its remaining possessions, the ‘few small islands, once staging posts on the shipping routes to the colonies, that are either too small or too remote to make their way alone in the world’:

With the loss of Hong Kong, Britain, which once administered the biggest Empire the world has ever seen, now has responsibility for fewer than 180,000 people in the remaining dependent territories. France still has three times as many citizens in its overseas departments, and has long given them full integration with metropolitan France. For these remaining few, Britain retains political and moral responsibility. Sadly the record here is poor. Drug-taking and money-laundering in the Caribbean, arguments over sovereignty in the Falklands and Gibraltar and the most appalling neglect of St Helena, Britain’s Atlantic Alcatraz, betray official irritation at being saddled with these pinpricks from a bygone age. There will be no more transfers of sovereignty. It is time now that the old ideals of Empire were properly applied to the small territories where Britain still holds sway.[4]

Eight weeks later, on 31 August, came news that genuinely staggered the world. Diana, Princess of Wales, and one of her lovers, Dodi Fayed, were killed along with their driver in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, Paris. Seven freelance photographers had been in pursuit and were arrested on manslaughter charges by French police (and later acquitted). Stothard was spending the weekend with Michael Portillo on the estate adjoining Balmoral when the news broke. He raced back to London with a leader written on a British Airways breakfast menu. In the meantime, Brian MacArthur who was editing the Sunday for Monday paper, had already begun masterminding the operation and, by common consent, pulled off a remarkable achievement. Over the next few days newspapers became, as Simon Jenkins observed, more like magazines as they sought not only to piece together the events that caused her death but also to assess her life and the extraordinary reaction to her premature demise. On the Sunday, the BBC provided all-day coverage. There were more than enough eulogies to fill it. No one else in the history of broadcasting had received this level of distinction.

Although some found it excessive, the saturation media coverage appeared to encourage an outpouring of public grief that was far removed from the decorous respect that had marked the passing of King George VI or Sir Winston Churchill. About sixty million flowers – more than one for every person in the kingdom – were laid at makeshift shrines at the west end of The Mall and, more especially, around the late Princess’s former home at Kensington Palace. This spectacle of contagious grief also contained a vengeful element intent on blaming both the press for hounding her to her doom and the royal family, first for stripping Diana of her royal title when, on her divorce, she ceased to be royal, and for failing to display publicly the sense of contrition and show of mental distress that was convulsing the millions of people who had never met her. Some republican sentiments were expressed and a potentially serious display of disloyalty towards the Queen and the Prince of Wales was possibly avoided only by a belated loosening of protocol – the royal standard was lowered to halfmast above Buckingham Palace and the Queen was persuaded to make a television broadcast the day before the funeral in which she spoke of Diana’s great gifts.

Noting the prevalence of young people among the grieving crowds, Simon Jenkins mused that:

The young seek role models not among the contented but among those before whom the world has dangled every pleasure and yet snatched it away … People seem to take comfort in watching the famous find life as hard as they do themselves … The word used time and again by those queueing at St James’s yesterday was that she represented ‘comfort’.[5]

In his funeral oration, Earl Spencer expressed the views of the vengeful, attacking not only the press which had hunted her, but, in an extraordinary display of lèse-majesté, the royal family. He had ensured that no tabloid editor was invited to the funeral. Given his late sister’s reliance on the ‘red tops’ to print information she leaked to them this insistence bemused those in the media who had first-hand experience of her modus operandi. In contrast, the broadsheet editors, with whom she had dealt far less frequently, were admitted to Westminster Abbey, even though in The Times’s case this meant receiving a stiff cream envelope from the Lord Chamberlain addressed to someone called Peter Pennington Esq – as if the editor had, like a peer of the realm, assumed the name of his territorial domain.

Certainly, those seeking to chronicle each twist of the Prince and Princess of Wales’s matrimonial break-up would not find The Times to have been Fleet Street’s primary source. For Peter Stothard, the most insightful episode in his relations with Diana had occurred the first time he had been granted a private lunch with her in a Park Lane restaurant on 18 May 1994. He was astonished by her forthrightness and ability to impart so much information in so short a period. Within the first five minutes she had already slipped into the conversation a damaging observation about her husband. ‘She was as charming that day as everyone always says that she is. But she did not move outside the lines that she had most clearly defined,’ Stothard recalled in an article about that first lunch, published three days after her death:

Inside those lines were the very aspects of her life which most people keep outside in discussion with newspaper editors – her husband, his mistress, her in-laws, her own fragile sense of herself. Within minutes I felt I was talking to someone I knew. By the time that she had toyed her way through her foie gras and lamb, I knew things about her that I did not know about my closest friends.

Stothard had not until that moment taken an interest in what he considered mere royal gossip and had assumed that much of what had been printed in the popular press was ‘misleading, false, fourth-hand, or worse’. It suddenly became clear to him how much of it was directly attributable to its royal source. To Stothard’s unease, the Princess began to tell him a story about how she had helped a tramp who had fallen into the Regent’s Park Canal and that she was going to visit him in hospital in the afternoon. What was Stothard supposed to make of – or with – this story? ‘I had missed enough “royal exclusives” in my life to be far from sure that I had not just somehow missed this one too,’ he later related. ‘That prospect obviously worried her as well. I did not seem interested enough. Some bits of her story did not fit together as well as a true story should. Yet it seemed churlish to cross-examine a Princess.’ With paparazzi gathering outside the restaurant, the editor and the Princess slipped away in the Times limousine so that she could be conveyed to the hospital without attracting any media attention. Later that day, Stothard received a letter from Diana thanking him for the ‘rescue’ adding, ‘Today of all days it meant a great deal to me not to be photographed.’ Yet, intriguingly, the following morning the newspapers carried full accounts of how she had saved the tramp in the canal. The Times also carried the story even although Stothard had not mentioned it to anyone.[6]

Predictably, the reaction of readers when Stothard related the occasion of his lunch with the late Princess was divided. Those who found the outbreak of national hysteria unsettling were delighted to have their suspicions confirmed that she had been a manipulative figure, ready to brief the press one moment then affect hurt at the intrusive publicity the next. Other readers felt that the editor of The Times ought not to be telling tales before her body was even formally laid to rest. In any case, she was hardly the only member of what she had memorably called a ‘crowded’ marriage to have briefed the press. Many of the hostile observations about her in the press during her life had derived from sources within the Prince of Wales’s circle of friends. The Times was not the first port of call for either side of the warring couple to leak a story. The Sun and the Daily Mail were regarded far more fertile ground. For The Times, the issue had been whether to repeat what was appearing elsewhere and risk accusations of publishing royal tittle-tattle or ignore it and miss stories concerning two of the world’s most famous people, one of whom was destined to be Britain’s Head of State. Stothard related that, ‘The problem was that my perception that the stories were mostly true was at odds with the perception of most Times readers that they were mostly false and were being presented either as just selling newspapers, idle gossip or in pursuit of some republican agenda.’ This last point was a particularly invidious charge given Murdoch’s personal republican leanings. Any Times report or comment that showed the House of Windsor in a less than perfect light could be accused of being prompted by the proprietor’s supposed views on the subject. In fact, Murdoch did not even raise the subject of The Times’s approach to monarchy with his editor. ‘I never ever had a discussion with him about that at all,’ Stothard stated after his retirement from the editorship.[7] While reserving its right to find fault with individuals, The Times remained true to the coat of arms on its masthead and loyal to the concept of monarchy.

For its part, the monarchy appeared to be relaxed about the occasionally irreverent treatment it received from The Times. ‘That’s Mr Hamilton. Don’t talk to him; he’ll only write terribly rude things about you,’ the Queen once instructed a Nigerian in full tribal costume who she spotted about to engage in conversation Alan Hamilton, The Times’s royal tours veteran, in the garden of the British High Commissioner’s residence in Abuja. The admonishment delivered, the Queen turned to Hamilton and gave him a knowing, sympathetic look before bursting into a smile. ‘I took this as a compliment,’ the sardonically droll Scotsman reflected; ‘at least she reads the stuff.’[8]

IV

With each successive Times editor, Bernard Levin, perhaps the nation’s most famous columnist, had developed an affectionate rapport. He would not depart for a holiday without leaving several articles already written to cover his absence. From distant parts, he would send the editor amusing mementos. From one trip to California in 1993 he sent Stothard a headline cutting from the Santa Barbara News-Press proclaiming, ‘Suit says newspaper editor “went berserk”’ to which he appended his own pithy leg-pull. Levin was genuinely loved by those who knew him and revered by those who did not. He had become as much a fixture of The Times as the crossword at the back. Yet, as the decade wore on, he presented Stothard with a problem. His memory was beginning to fail. There were occasions when he would attempt to file again on the same subject he had written about at length only days before. There remained flashes of the old brilliance but as he started a long and cruel battle with senile dementia so the quality of his column became uneven. Neither Stothard nor Bryant wanted to confront the issue, although letters from concerned readers were beginning to arrive in the editor’s office suggesting that releasing Levin from his twice-weekly obligations would be an act of mercy. Both the editor and deputy editor admired and revered a man whose many acts of quiet thoughtfulness were witnessed by all who felt themselves privileged to be counted among his friends. Yet, for most of the inmates of Wapping, Levin appeared self-contained to the point of being withdrawn. He would spend long hours in his small glass cell of an office, peering out with sad eyes, his lugubrious expression fleetingly met by those hurrying past on their way to talk to someone else. Although he was initially reluctant to speak about it, he knew his mental powers were starting to fail him and at times appeared distressed to the point where colleagues feared he would end it all with tablets and champagne. Instead, he chose to struggle on until Stothard grasped the nettle and persuaded him that he must scale down his output. Levin filed his last regular column on 10 January 1997, a lament for the declining quality of new plays and the impact this would have on the West End, without which there would be ‘a great hole in the fabric of our land’.[9] It was suggested he should write more at his leisure for the weekend section and this he did for the rest of the year, criticizing the Chinese government, the persecutors of smokers and, finally, in 1998, his reflections on the Court of Appeal’s posthumous quashing of Derek Bentley’s conviction for murder – a cause célèbre he had long championed. It would prove to be his last piece. After it, the efforts of memory proved too great and the country was denied any further observations from a man who had bestrode his profession. His battle with dementia lost, he died in 2004.

There were changes of location as well as personnel. In March 1998, The Times moved its address for only the fourth time in its history. On this occasion, the move could not have been shorter, since it merely involved crossing from the south side of Pennington Street to the north side. The Napoleonic rum warehouse was too small to contain all the paper’s departments and decamping across the road to the newly built six-storey office block was a matter of necessity. Despite its undistinguished architecture, some had come to appreciate the old building’s bunker-like qualities and the fact that its long, open-plan interior allowed a virtually unobstructed view of everyone in the office at the same time. While journalists toiled on tomorrow’s copy, all the past editions were stored, leather-bound, under their feet in the catacombs of the brick vaults below. Its unusualness had become its principal charm and, for some, the hassle of moving a matter of metres away to a new building that lacked a decent sense of history hardly seemed worth the effort. How much of an improvement the new building was quickly became a matter for debate. Despite moving from a largely windowless shed to new glass and brick office block designed by the fashionable architect Rick Mather and rejoicing in the preposterous name of ‘La Lumière’, many journalists were unimpressed by their new residence and soon rechristened it ‘La Gloomy Air’. The building was quickly given an official rebranding as ‘Times House’. Before long, however, the welcoming air turned stale as the extent of the drainage problem in the lavatories and a rat infestation became apparent. Some, of course, joked that from a professional standpoint this was appropriate.

Aesthetically, the new residence was less than exciting, representing the styleless architectural interlude that followed the exuberant if tacky postmodernism of the 1980s. The newsroom was successfully accommodated in one large, open-plan ground floor. The leader writers enjoyed greater seclusion on the floor above where the various associate editors were given small glass compartments in which to pretend they enjoyed privacy. Stothard fared better and was able to move into an office that was finally large enough to hold small conferences and accommodate his extensive personal library of historical and biographical tomes. He, at least, was given wooden bookshelves. Elsewhere in the building they were made of metal, fitted with fold-down shutters and painted blue to resemble outsized deposit boxes. There was no reason to believe their designer had any acquaintance with the shape and dimensions of a book. This was not the least of the disappointments. A dank central courtyard became the equivalent of the school bike shed for the paper’s resident smokers. On higher levels, steel gantries and a metal staircase that resonated with the constant clinkety-clank sound of its users’ feet conveyed the sights and sounds of being on a Panamanian registered oil tanker. Deeper within the building, even the carpeted zones appeared to have been designed for steerage class. Some of the connecting corridors were so narrow that it was impossible for two people to pass each other without doing a forty-five-degree twist of the pelvis. This militated against hanging the treasures of the past on the walls and it was not until 2004 that oil paintings of the Walter, Northcliffe and Astor owners were hung in the entrance foyer as a first and much needed concession to decoration. An enclosed glass footbridge was constructed over Pennington Street and the old warehouse in order to link The Times ‘s new residence with the facilities – including the reference library, restaurant and gym – that it shared with the other newspapers in the group above the print hall. The design of the enclosed bridge ensured that it funnelled scorching heat in summer and arctic chill in the other three seasons. Oddly, the new home’s peculiarities invested it with a welcome, if unintended, degree of eccentricity.

Meanwhile, the old rum warehouse The Times left behind became the repository for various News International departments, including the Archive and Record Centre. The Times’s archives had first been opened to historical researchers on a limited basis during Rees-Mogg’s editorship. The driving force behind improving the conditions in which they were kept and making them more readily available to the public came from the venerable Sir Edward Pickering who, at the age of eighty-six, remained one of Murdoch’s most trusted and respected executives. With ‘Pick’s’ backing, the company invested in new temperature-controlled storerooms for the paper’s documents in an archive that filled over a kilometre of shelving space. At last, a proper budget was assigned to conserving the paper’s heritage and even to procure further relevant material at auction. With Eamon Dyas as chief archivist, The Times became in June 1998 the first national newspaper to offer outside researchers free and comprehensive access to its historic collection. ‘Pick’ had made many contributions to the paper’s welfare since his appointment as Times Newspapers’ executive vice-chairman in 1982. In particular, he had been a sagacious source of advice to successive editors and enjoyed the trust and indeed admiration of Murdoch who considered him his ‘first great mentor’. There were, after all, no other 1950s Fleet Street editors still in senior management positions as the twentieth century drew to a close. Indeed, Sir Edward came to the view that he was too old to retire, stayed at his post and died in harness at the age of ninety-one in 2003, an acknowledged giant of Fleet Street. Of his many services to The Times, his support for the ongoing project of writing the paper’s official history and the creation of a properly endowed Archive Centre were among the tangible monuments. The access provided to scholars greatly enhanced The Times’s claims to be the historian’s paper of record.

V

Despite the quality of gentlemen going into it, the journalistic world into which Sir Edward Pickering had first ventured before the Second World War was still widely regarded as a trade. By the time of his death, it had clear pretensions to becoming a profession. For those at the broadsheets, salaries had finally reached a level of professional standing and the proportion of those with university degrees had greatly increased. Many even had degrees in journalism. Yet, among the public, the reputation of journalism had enjoyed no such assent. Inexplicably, the papers that were most popular with the public were those that were also held up to have descended deepest into the gutter. During the 1980s, the Press Council’s ability to police Fleet Street was increasingly questioned by the Street of Shame’s periodic, and high-profile, excesses. Founded in 1953, the Council’s chief sanction was that, where it found fault, it could force newspapers to publish its adjudications. Without an agreed code of conduct, its judgments perhaps inevitably lacked consistency and neither journalists, editors nor aggrieved parties appeared to place confidence in it.

Cleaning up the press was not an easy task. Much of the criticism, in particular of the popular press, was directed at its right-wing bias and lowbrow tastes. Yet, drawing up statutory powers to curb such editorial judgments was to stray into dangerous and authoritarian waters in which the law would intrude into value judgments better left – for all their shortcomings – to the forces of competition. Indefensible harassment and deliberate misrepresentation was a different matter. Those who felt they had been libelled had recourse to the courts (at any rate, if they had the time and money). Fleet Street’s broadsheet and tabloid editors were united in favouring self-regulation over statutory intervention, but the Press Council’s failure to produce speedy, consistent and authoritative judgments ensured that it was no longer the vehicle to guarantee the former. In the House of Commons, various private members’ bills proposed a statutory right of reply and the protection of privacy. Nothing better assisted the cause of those demanding a right of privacy than the actions of journalists from the Sunday Sport who, in 1990, barged into a hospital to photograph and attempt to interview the comic actor Gordon Kaye as he lay seriously injured on a life-support machine. Believing that, as the law stood, it was within its rights to publish the pictures taken, the Sport demonstrated its careless arrogance by responding to a reprimand for its actions with the headline ‘Bollocks to the Press Council’. By then, the Government had already decided to act and had appointed Sir David Calcutt QC, the Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, to chair an enquiry into the press and privacy. The six other members of his committee included Simon Jenkins, who had recently been appointed The Times’s editor.

Fleet Street’s editors had traditionally been opposed to drawing up a code of ethics but the possibility of having one forced upon them brought an abrupt change of tune. In line with other newspapers, in 1989 The Times appointed its former managing editor and deputy editor, John Grant, as its readers’ representative, charged with investigating readers’ complaints and alleged errors or misrepresentations. Calcutt issued his report in May 1990. It called for the Press Council to be replaced by the Press Complaints Commission (PCC). It would implement a code of practice (the code itself was drawn up and agreed by a committee of editors). For newspapers, the most important part of the report was that it did not sanction a privacy law. But Calcutt made clear the press was on probation. If self-regulation did not work, statutory regulation should follow.

Promoting greater responsibility from the tabloids was the main goal of the PCC, but it was not long before The Times fell foul. A Times Diary article in May 1991 had alleged that Bernie Grant, the Labour MP, had encouraged a US congressman to boycott the Queen’s address to Congress because of racism in Britain.[10] The source for the story in Washington DC, was a good one and when Bernie Grant failed to return The Times’s telephone call, the allegation was printed without securing his side of the story. When it was published, the MP categorically denied it. When the PCC subsequently condemned The Times for its tardy checking of facts, the newspaper quickly responded by making amends in line with the code of practice.[11] Some of the tabloids, however, appeared to regard a rap on the knuckles as an incitement to behave more outspokenly. The Sunday People reacted to complaints about its publication of a photograph of the Duke of York’s infant daughter, Princess Eugenie, naked (she was bathing within a private walled garden at the time) by republishing it with a telephone hotline for readers to say whether or not they found it offensive under the caption ‘Come on Andy where’s your sense of fun?’. The crude excesses of a few risked a statutory backlash that could do far more to gag the serious journalism upon which a free society rested.

There was certainly no shortage of salacious copy to promote, much of it provided by the royal family. The efforts of the PCC’s chairman, Lord McGregor, to bring the press to book had been swiftly handicapped by the Princess of Wales. McGregor’s attempts to protect her dignity were undermined when it was revealed that the source for many of the stories, particularly those he condemned in Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story, serialized in the Sunday Times, was none other than Diana herself. The tabloids’ blood sport at the expense of the royal family continued unabated. When David Mellor, the Heritage Secretary, was provoked into warning that the press ‘was drinking in the last chance saloon’, the Sunday People destroyed Mellor’s career by revealing his affair with a resting actress, complete with various inaccurate but highly embarrassing details provided by the publicist Max Clifford.

Meanwhile, Calcutt had been asked to review the workings of the PCC. In 1993 his second report concluded that the self-regulation he had helped put in place had failed and that with ‘no realistic possibility’ of getting its house in order the PCC should be replaced by a statutory tribunal presided over by a judge armed with powers to block publication, fine miscreants and force published retractions. In particular, there would be legal restraints on such staples of investigative reporting as the use of electronic bugging and long-lens photography. Calcutt’s proposals represented what, in effect, resembled a privacy law. In common with the rest of Fleet Street, The Times was appalled, accusing the ‘blinkered’ Calcutt of producing a report that ranged ‘between the supercilious and the hostile. In that respect it is certainly a document of its time.’[12] The paper had already made clear its belief that statutory regulation, and in particular a privacy law, ‘would be a delight to all those with something infamous to hide and a grave blow to the freedom of the press’.[13] The Times’s upholding of this freedom was strengthened by its commitment to freedom of expression on its own pages. Among Times columnists, Calcutt found a champion in Woodrow Wyatt. Wyatt, who managed to combine a reverence for the royal family with a close friendship with Rupert Murdoch, used his column to condemn the Sunday Times for peddling Andrew Morton’s book. What was more, he advocated the sort of French privacy legislation that would have made its publication illegal.[14] Wyatt maintained that The Times leader column’s reaction to Calcutt smacked of hysteria: ‘the US press vigorously attacks the president, his administration and his opponents without restraint. It is not in the least cowed by US privacy laws on Calcutt lines,’ he argued.[15]

An alternative argument questioned whether a privacy law was workable. Rees-Mogg observed that Calcutt’s proposals against using telephoto lens would not prevent foreign paparazzi having photographs published (indeed, many of the worst intrusions upon the royal family had been taken while abroad) and if there was to be a prohibition on bugging then it should include that undertaken by the State.[16] The Government, too, was reluctant to go as far as Calcutt deemed necessary but The Times, conscious that press criticism of the Government and its members’ private antics had lost it friends at Westminster, feared some form of retribution. The paper even opposed the less stringent findings of the National Heritage Select Committee, arguing its proposals for a press ombudsman, regional complaints offices and the replacement of the PCC with a more powerful Press Commission stood a chance of being implemented ‘because some ministers want to placate parliamentarians and some parliamentarians want to protect their friends’.[17]

In the event, the Government settled for a more modest restructuring of the PCC that put disinterested parties in the majority. Attention was focused upon the PCC’s code of practice which was designed to promote responsible journalism. Drawn too tightly, it could threaten legitimate investigative freedom. Thus it attempted to find a balance by permitting newspapers to breach eight of its sixteen rules if they could establish it was in the ‘public interest’ to do so. Exposing criminality or wrongdoing, safeguarding public health and safety and correcting misleading statements were three areas that were commonly accepted to be within ‘the public interest’. The code stated that the public interest extended beyond these areas but decided it would be overly proscriptive to set the parameters and better to take it on a case by case basis. This left considerable room for editorial manoeuvring. To what extent were the private lives of public figures covered by the ‘public interest’? Newspapers could certainly claim so when it came to the royal family or politicians. When the Daily Mirror published photographs of the Duchess of York – separated from but still married to the Duke – in an intimate setting with her financial adviser, The Times argued that ‘the best defence the duchess and the rest of the royal family can throw up against intrusion is to show greater discretion in their private behaviour’. While it accepted that publishing the photograph might demonstrate a ‘lack of taste’, it was wrong ‘to expect a legal fiat to lay down the bounds of good taste in a matter such as this’.[18] The paper had a similar attitude to politicians. The tabloids had a field day exposing the sex lives of Conservative MPs, justifying doing so not on grounds of prurience (although this was a large part of it) but because, as members of a party allegedly committed to family values, there was a public interest in exposing them as hypocrites. The Times did not take the lead in exposing the private lives of public figures, although it was happy to report them once other newspapers had already published the details. It did not have a scoop in this area until 2003 (outside the scope of this volume) when, having secured the rights to Edwina Currie’s diaries, it broke the news that the former Health Minister had had an affair with John Major. Neither party (and least of all Ms Currie) lodged a complaint about the exposure.

In the spring of 1998, however, The Times found itself at the centre of a storm when it serialized Gitta Sereny’s book Cries Unheard about the child killer, Mary Bell. In Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, Sereny had written an acclaimed study of Hitler’s architect and wartime planner who had escaped the death penalty at Nuremberg. In it, she carefully unpeeled the seemingly ambiguous relationship he had had towards the crimes of the Nazi regime he had served so well. Cries Unheard attempted to understand how, at the age of eleven, Mary Bell had strangled two young boys. The book dwelt on the deprivation and abuse that Bell had experienced as a child.

With memories fresh about the murder of the toddler Jamie Bulger by two young boys, an atrocity that had gripped and horrified the public, Sereny’s theme had resonance. As a book, its intent was far removed from the titillation of some true-crime literature. Nonetheless, its publication and The Times’s serialization caused uproar. Sereny had written the book with Bell’s participation – help for which the ex-convict was paid. Bell, it was argued, had therefore profited from her crimes. Tony Blair waded into the furore by describing the payment to Bell as ‘repugnant’. Furthermore, given the stigma that her crime had placed upon her, Bell had been granted a life injunction on her release from jail that prevented her from being identified. Benefiting from this, she had been able to start a new life under an assumed identity and had brought up a daughter who was unaware of her mother’s grim past. Cries Unheard and its serialization in The Times provided the tabloid press with an excuse to hunt Bell down. Her cover was blown and, in the face of considerable media harassment and unwanted publicity, she was forced to tell her daughter the truth.

The affair raised many questions. The greatest fury was directed at the antics of the tabloid press whose rapacious desire to expose Bell appeared to come from low and sensationalist motives. Some, however, believed that by cooperating with the book Bell had brought the attention upon herself. Others felt that Sereny herself was guilty of prurience and could not stand aloof from the consequences of her own book just because it was written in an anguished and high-minded style. The Times was disparaged for publishing its contents and paying Sereny serialization rights that increased her profit and, potentially, the sum Bell demanded for cooperation. Among rival newspaper editors, none was more scandalized by The Times’s decision than Charles Moore who told his readers, ‘I felt that this was a situation that a quality newspaper such as the Daily Telegraph must avoid.’ He assured them that if the Telegraph had behaved as The Times had done, he would have opened himself up to suspicions of being motivated ‘by the desire for profit, sales, sensation, controversy’ and risked his paper being found in breach of the PCC’s code of practice.[19] This was prophetic. Complaints were duly brought against The Times under Clause 16 (ii) of the code which prohibited newspapers paying convicted or confessed criminals for their stories unless there is an identifiable public interest defence. Here then, was the ‘public interest’ catch-all put to the test.

When, in July 1998, it issued its report, the PCC cleared The Times of wrongdoing on the grounds that the payment was in the public interest since it sought to explore the penal system’s treatment of child criminals. When the House of Lords debated the issue, Lord Wakeham, the PCC chairman, went further, claiming ‘the public interest oozes from every pore of the book and in turn from the extracts from it which was serialised in the newspaper’. Although he conceded that the public interest should not be confused with what the public might be interested in, Wakeham considered what Sereny ‘had to say was important and deserved a wide audience’.[20]

Legally, the issue of criminals benefiting from their crimes was a difficult one. The PCC also cleared the Express and the Mirror for paying two nurses, Deborah Parry and Lucille McLauchlan, convicted of murder in Saudi Arabia, for their stories as well as the Telegraph for serializing a memoir by Sean O’Callaghan, a convicted IRA terrorist who had subsequently rejected violence and become a police informer. The existing law permitted the Home Secretary to confiscate money made from criminals writing memoirs. The Government recognized that it was an area of law in need of review but there were difficulties in tightening it up, not least since the European Convention of Human Rights (entrenched in English Law by the 1998 Human Rights Act) guaranteed freedom of expression for everyone, including criminals.

It was in branding a Russian businessman an alleged mafia boss that The Times found itself testing the libel laws in the wake of the Human Rights Act. During 1999, the paper published a series of more than forty articles analysing organized crime and the theft of Russian assets since the collapse of the USSR, but it was two articles written in the autumn on 1999 by David Lister, with assistance from James Bone from the paper’s New York bureau, that unwittingly made an important contribution to British law.

Lister and Bone’s article named Grigori Loutchansky as an ‘alleged … Russian mafia boss’ under investigation in the Bank of New York money-laundering scandal. A second report suggested he had provided a chauffeur and staff in Israel for Lev Chernoi, another Russian businessman who was under investigation for money laundering.[21] According to his own testimony, Loutchansky first heard from a report on Russian television that The Times of London had linked him to organized crime. He decided to sue for libel and try to clear his name.

David Lister was a twenty-five-year-old Cambridge history graduate who had worked for the Evening Standard before joining The Times. In August 1999 he had been tipped off by a former detective with the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the National Crime Squad that a British investigation was pending into Loutchansky’s alleged role in the Bank of New York money-laundering scandal. A supplementary source was Jeffrey Robinson, the author of a book on international organized crime, who told him that the Russian businessman was also being investigated by the FBI. According to Lister’s notes, Robinson had even suggested that Loutchansky and Semion Mogilevich had sold Scud missiles to the Iraqi regime. Naturally, Lister decided to follow up these intriguing leads and asked a high-ranking FBI intelligence officer who was on secondment at Interpol’s headquarters in Lyons if Loutchanksy was being investigated over the Bank of New York scandal. According to Lister, she had laughed nervously and replied, ‘I believe it would be fruitful to write about it.’ A trawl of published reports turned up allegations that Loutchansky’s firm, Nordex, had been established with KGB money and that it had possible links with the Russian mafia.[22]

Some facts were easily verifiable. A businessman in his mid-fifties with joint Israeli and Russian citizenship, Loutchansky’s career had resembled the twists and turns of a fairground roller coaster. At twenty-nine he had become pro-rector at the Latvian State University of Riga. Charged with embezzling various items including university furniture, he had been convicted in 1983 for embezzlement, forgery and abuse of power. He was given a seven-year sentence, part of which was spent in Siberia. After his release he had become general manager of Nordex, a Vienna-based company that claimed to trade in fertilizer. Despite this innocuous sounding line of business, in December 1994 Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, had refused him entry to Britain on the grounds that his presence ‘would not be conducive to the public good’. Jack Straw, Howard’s Labour successor at the Home Office, renewed the ban. This was not the only black mark. In 1996, Time magazine described Loutchansky as ‘a man considered by many to be the most pernicious unindicted criminal in the world’.[23]

Given what had already been said about him in the United States, Loutchansky’s decision to sue The Times for libel was a surprise to some. He claimed it was not about money but about clearing his name. Despite upholding the general ban on his entry into the country, Jack Straw allowed him to come to London on a temporary visa to testify against the newspaper. What followed was a trial of the utmost importance. A standard libel trial would have involved The Times trying to prove justification – in other words that its allegations were true. The problem for The Times, however, was that it did not have the evidence to prove the allegations were true. Like many of those who made allegations involving international money laundering, The Times had to concede that such evidence as might exist was held by authorities – like MI6, the Home Office, British and foreign police investigation departments – which were not in a position to disclose what (if anything) they knew. Thus, The Times opted for a ‘qualified privilege’ defence instead. In doing so, the paper was testing a new precedent in libel law. Historically, press ‘privilege’ from the rigours of British libel law had primarily protected parliamentary and court reporting but its scope had been greatly widened in a landmark ruling made in 1999. This was the so-called ‘Reynolds Defence’ when the House of Lords had ruled in a dispute between the Sunday Times and the former Irish Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, that a newspaper could print information it could not verify as true if it met ten criteria set out by Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead for responsible journalism where there was a legitimate public interest. In Lord Nicholls’s judgment, qualified privilege was a permissible defence even if there were factual inaccuracies published, if the reporting was in good faith using reliable and impartial sources and reasonable attempts to establish their veracity had been taken.

The trial of ‘Loutchansky v Times Newspapers’ began on 19 March 2001 in the High Court. The presiding judge was Charles Gray who, in a noted career as a libel barrister, had defended high-profile clients against media accusations, winning record damages for Lord Aldington from Nikolai Tolstoy but unsuccessfully defending Jonathan Aitken against the Guardian. The Times’s counsel was Richard Spearman QC while Desmond Browne QC appeared for the plaintiff. It was the first jury trial on a ‘qualified privilege’ case since the Reynolds verdict. However, the jury’s role was restricted to determining whether they believed Lister’s claims that he had shown proper diligence in compiling his report. It was up to the judge to rule whether the qualified privilege defence was valid.

Since the publication of the original articles, The Times had been busy collecting information to support the allegations. However, in a decision upheld by the Court of Appeal, Mr Justice Gray declared inadmissible any evidence gathered after the original claims were made. Consequently, the court was denied knowledge of affidavits from the Israeli Interior Ministry opposing the renewal of Loutchansky’s passport and regarding the reasons for the Home Secretary’s ban on his coming to Britain, as well as a communication between the US Department of State and the embassy in Tel Aviv that led to his being denied a US visa, and reports compiled by the police forces of Israel, Austria and Interpol. With Peter Stothard watching from the back of the courtroom, Loutchansky took the stand and implied that his 1983 conviction was a trumped-up charge by the KGB who were concerned at his pro-democracy sentiments and, indeed, that it was his ‘feeling’ that ‘The Times newspaper had somebody behind them in all this action. It’s something to do with the people who stand behind them.’[24] His QC clashed repeatedly with Lister, attempting to undermine his journalistic professionalism. Certainly, The Times’s defence would have been stronger if it had provided Loutchansky with a proper forum to reply to the allegations when they were first made. Unfortunately this had not been done. Despite using an internet search engine, Lister had failed to locate Loutchansky’s London or American lawyers nor had an attempt to locate him in Moscow borne fruit. The plaintiff’s counsel also sought to belittle the credibility of Lister’s anonymous sources. An attempt by Lister to assert why they might consider their lives endangered was halted by the judge. By comparison, James Bone, who had a first-class law degree from Cambridge, appeared almost to enjoy being cross-examined by Desmond Browne.

When the moment came to return a verdict, the jury found generally in favour of Lister’s honesty as a reporter. Of the fifteen questions they were asked, they found on ten counts in his favour, on two counts against and recorded three failures to reach a verdict. Importantly, on the substantive questions of the Interpol officer’s words, and those of the other main informants, Lister’s testimony was upheld. The verdict from the judge proved a different matter. On 27 April, Mr Justice Gray accepted that the claims were ‘very serious’ but that there was ‘no great urgency’ to report what, he asserted in news terms, were ‘low grade’ stories and that The Times did not have a duty to publish. He believed newspapers enjoyed qualified privilege from the laws of libel only when they would be open to legitimate criticism if they failed to publish the contentious information. The Times was also forced to remove from its internet archive the offending articles, the judge taking the view that a website effectively involved constant republication of the libel every time it received a hit. This judgment had huge implications for archive management in the electronic age, creating – in contrast to the printed newspaper – an unlimited timescale of liability.

The Times immediately made a submission to the Court of Appeal to reverse the decision. In the summation of the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, the judge appeared to have concluded, ‘that the subject matter was in the public interest, but that The Times had no duty to report it’.[25] In December, the Appeal judges ruled that Mr Justice Gray had applied ‘the wrong test’ on the question of the paper’s duty to publish and sent the case back to him for reconsideration. However, Gray proceeded to restate his original judgment that The Times did not enjoy qualified privilege and threw out its attempt to enter a new plea of justification; he would not permit a new libel trial in which the paper hoped to prove its allegations were true by reference to an Italian police report – Operation Spiderweb. This infuriated the paper, which had in the meantime acquired a 232-page report compiled by the public prosecutor in Bologna into alleged international money laundering that referred to various companies apparently linked to Loutchansky.[26]

London had been dubbed ‘the libel capital of the world’ in the 1990s, but newspaper lawyers like The Times’s Alastair Brett looked forward to the new century as one in which the scales of justice would tilt in investigative journalism’s favour. The European Convention’s defence of freedom of expression, written into British law by the 1998 Human Rights Act and the Reynolds judgment the following year, were interpreted as moves in this direction. Mr Justice Gray’s judgment in the case of ‘Loutchansky v Times Newspapers’ suggested otherwise. Furthermore, the judgment that an online archive represented constant re-publication had repercussions for the British media that its American counterparts were spared: in the United States the limitation date was set by the day an article was first transferred to an electronic database or website.[27]

Yet the lack of a considerable body of case law meant that there was likely to be much movement in the years ahead. In the case against Loutchansky, The Times had marred its claim to qualified privilege by failing to withhold publication until the accused had been given the opportunity to give a full rebuttal. In this respect, the paper published in haste and repented at leisure. Although it did not reach the courts, an example of a Times journalist successfully guarding his integrity had taken place on 30 January 1999 when the paper’s football correspondent, Matt Dickinson, interviewed the England football coach, Glenn Hoddle. During the course of their talk, Hoddle – who believed in reincarnation – had expressed the opinion that people with disabilities were being punished for sins in a previous life.[28] The response was a public uproar and, facing the sack, Hoddle claimed Dickinson had misrepresented his comments and that he would be issuing a writ. Tony Blair even managed to get involved, announcing that Hoddle should resign but only if he had been honestly reported. Fortunately, Dickinson’s shorthand skills ensured he had a very full note of what had been said and a BBC tape was produced in which Hoddle could be heard expressing similar views for an interview on Radio Five Live the previous year. Hoddle dropped his threat of legal action and was duly sacked while Dickinson’s scoop was applauded and The Times was vindicated in the treatment of his article. In this there was a lesson that needed to be impressed upon Fleet Street and beyond. Because the Hoddle interview had been conducted using good journalistic practices Dickinson had been able to defend himself and the paper from the threat of legal action. In the Loutchansky case, however, the judge had convinced himself that The Times reporting had fallen short of such standards. Whatever the subsequent development of qualified privilege, the guidelines established by judges and law lords promised to shape the conduct of responsible journalism in the years ahead. The consequences of failing to follow best practice were to be graphically demonstrated when, in 2003, Andrew Gilligan, a reporter for the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, aired his impression of what he had been told by the Iraqi weapons inspector David Kelly without being able to furnish a comprehensive record of the conversation. The consequences were unfortunate for all concerned.

VI

The difficulties experienced by journalists trying to establish the reliability of information in Britain were not as great as those faced by foreign correspondents reporting from the world’s remaining one-party states. Totalitarian governments were content to impart an official line on events (or even deny their existence) to foreign journalists, but this was no guarantee of accuracy. States that retained an iron grip on the supply of information were successful in censoring or banning reputable news agencies, papers and broadcasters from uncovering a truer picture of events. But such tactics failed to crush a subculture of rumour and gossip whose purveyors constantly sought out foreign journalists. The problem was that publishing unverifiable rumours was no more responsible than merely parroting the version of events narrated by State officials. Establishing if the rumours had any basis in fact in countries where reporters were not at liberty to probe at will or where potential witnesses were too frightened to talk on the record tested the resourcefulness of the most seasoned foreign correspondents.

No greater challenge could be provided than the enclosed world of Communist North Korea. In 1992, posing as a university lecturer, David Watts managed to get into the country on a special tour that featured an odd selection of fellow travellers, including a trade unionist from Bradford who periodically lectured his hosts about the need to make their society more Communist. Viewing the demilitarized zone from the North Korean side was a revelation. A twenty-four-foot high anti-tank wall (not visible from the southern side) ran the width of the country. Attempts by the north to tunnel under it had been thwarted. At another post, fifteen-foot-high loudspeakers blaring out Souza marches and the sound of automatic weapons fire serenaded the North Koreans. Watts was astonished by what he took to be the lack of military preparedness on North Korea’s part. A modern expressway had been constructed from the border to Pyongyang and during the entire journey only four vehicles were spotted on it. There was little sign in the countryside that the world’s most socialist state had provided much public transport: just children wandering barefoot on their way to school with the possibility of a lift from an army lorry. On arrival in Pyongyang, Watts discovered a capital city with great tower blocks, many of which, on closer inspection, appeared to be empty. A 105-storey, pyramid-shaped hotel had been constructed on the suggestion of Kim Il Sung’s heir, Kim Jong Il, but it had never been finished because the shape was useless for installing lifts. Gaining reliable sources of information proved impossible. Watts could only record as the observant tourist he purported to be. He did catch the eightieth-birthday celebrations for the ‘Great Leader’. Most of the foreign dignitaries were from African states bearing gifts. ‘A BBC man proffered a corporation T-shirt,’ Watts noticed. ‘Unsure of its ideological appropriateness, it was accepted only to be returned because it was not properly wrapped.’[29]

North Korea’s profile in the news varied according to the level of tension in the demilitarized zone and the evidence that it was acquiring nuclear weapons. China, where a fifth of the world lived, was emerging from its Maoist introversion as a major power through the market reforms of Zhao Ziyang and Deng Xiaoping, and necessitated a continual reporting presence. Had Stothard but known it when he assumed the chair, it was The Times’s reporting of the politics of this part of the world that was to prove one of the most controversial aspect of his editorship. Indeed, it was to tarnish the paper’s reputation across wide sections of the British public and beyond.

In 1993, The Times appointed two new correspondents in China: James Pringle replaced Cathy Sampson in Beijing and Jonathan Mirsky established himself in Hong Kong. Pringle had been the paper’s stringer in Cambodia and Thailand. He had previously reported China’s affairs during Mao’s Cultural Revolution for Reuters and Newsweek. It was not unusual in one-party states for the securing of journalists’ visas to be a protracted war of attrition and months passed before the Chinese authorities would grant him one, despite approaches to the Chinese Ambassador and press attaché in London who passed the matter onto the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing which, in turn, complained at the ‘slanderous and uninformed’ tone of some Times editorials.[30]

Mild was the manner of Beijing’s unease over Jimmy Pringle compared to the suspicion with which it regarded Jonathan Mirsky. Mirsky was an American academic specializing in Oriental Studies who had studied at Columbia and Cambridge and taught at Dartmouth and Pennsylvania universities before the Vietnam War provoked his decision to quit American shores. Through his friendship with Conor Cruise O’Brien, he had gone to China as a reporter for the Observer. It was while filing for that paper that he witnessed the horror of the Tiananmen Square massacre. He was in the Square close to the portrait of Mao when the soldiers opened fire on the crowd. He witnessed soldiers beating the protestors. An officer shot those forced to the ground. Suddenly he realized the soldiers were fixing upon him. He tried to make clear that he was a journalist and gestured that he was leaving. A soldier swore at him and, turning to his comrades, screamed at them to kill him. Mirsky was grabbed by two of the soldiers while a couple more started beating him. Desperately he tried to hold onto a balustrade, aware that once they had kicked him to the ground he would get a bullet through the skull. At the very moment in which he was making his last efforts to stay upright an Italian vice-consul and his friend, a young Australian reporter, were scurrying across the Square to make good their escape. As they did so they caught sight of the desperate Mirsky, arms flailing. Without pausing to weigh up the danger, the two men turned back to rescue him. The Australian, no more than an acquaintance of Mirsky’s, managed to get a hold of him as he was being pushed down. ‘Come on, Jonathan, let’s go now,’ he said with remarkable coolness and jostled him free. A hail of bullets followed in their path as they hurried away. The Australian, whose name was Robert Thomson, had saved Mirsky’s life. In 2002, he became editor of The Times.[31]

Like many who had witnessed the distressing scenes in Tiananmen Square, Mirsky found it difficult to maintain an objective view of the Chinese government he vehemently distrusted. Keen to stay on as a reporter, it was not an easy posting for one determined to explore beyond the explanations provided by the press briefings. He regularly had to navigate round the obstruction and admonishments of his official minder. Rather more ominously, he had to endure unknown people emerging from the shadows on street corners to accuse him of spreading lies and warning him of the consequences before turning away, back into the anonymity of the crowd. Who were these people? How did they know who he was or what his movements were? In particular, his trips to Tibet provoked this form of harassment. His telephone was tapped and his mail opened. In 1991, after he had covered John Major’s first visit to China, the authorities made it clear they had had enough of Mirsky’s journalism. They threw him out of the country.

Stothard’s decision to employ such an authentic thorn in the flesh of the Beijing government was a courageous one. It certainly showed no regard for the commercial interests of the proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, who was beginning to invest in what he hoped would be a pan-China satellite television empire – for which he needed Beijing’s approbation. Unabashed, Stothard made Mirsky East Asia editor and, when the latter queried whether there might be a potential clash with Murdoch’s business interest in appeasing the Chinese authorities, Stothard assured him that he was a free agent who could write whatever he liked. That Beijing had refused Mirsky a visa to travel in the country was not an insurmountable problem. With Pringle filing from Beijing, Mirsky could base himself in Hong Kong, which still had four years left as a British colony. With the date of the handover approaching, Hong Kong would be as much a story as what was going on in the Chinese capital. Stothard was an enthusiastic supporter of the new (and last) Governor of the colony, Chris Patten, and his attempts to force through democratic reforms before Hong Kong was handed back to China. That Mirsky shared these sentiments was a further recommendation. Others were also pleased by the appointment. Douglas Hurd, the Foreign Secretary, went so far as to assure Mirsky of his delight that The Times was dispatching someone who he knew could be relied upon.[32]

It was not long before Richard Owen, The Times’s foreign editor, found himself summoned before the Chinese press attaché in London in order to be told of their embassy’s acute irritation at Mirsky’s reporting. An article by him that caused particular offence concerned allegations of cannibalism in Guangxi province during the Cultural Revolution and the state-created famine of 1959–61 that killed between sixteen and forty million people. Nor was Mirsky the only miscreant. There were also complaints about an article by Bernard Levin that thundered against the Foreign Office’s selling out of Hong Kong, or, as he put it, ‘the brave, beautiful, blazing bulwark against tyranny into bondage’. ‘The people of China are ruled by brutes and tyrants,’ Levin had continued, warming to his theme, before adding that Beijing’s occupation of Tibet ‘was a crime hardly less dreadful than those of the Nazis; it encompassed the utter destruction of a culture (and, more to the point, of the human beings, too) that had endured for countless centuries’.[33] The embassy’s complaints were politely noted and, it seemed, ignored.

Whether Britain was about to betray its Hong Kong subjects to a repressive regime was hotly debated on the pages of the paper. The 1984 Sino-British Declaration established that China would leave Hong Kong’s constitutional laws intact for at least fifty years after the handover in 1997. Deng Xiaoping summed up this settlement as ‘one country, two systems’. Yet the pretence of mutual trust had been subsequently rocked by two events. The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacres raised the spectre that Beijing would crush dissent in Hong Kong, imprison political opponents and imperil its economy by undermining the freedoms upon which its success was built. At the time of the massacre, one million Hong Kong citizens marched through the streets of the colony to protest. Many of them had fled from Chinese Communism in the first place and were fearful for their future once the colony was reabsorbed. In turn, China had cause to accuse Britain when Chris Patten set in motion plans to give the colony a fully elected legislature (it had been partly elected since 1991) and a Bill of Rights. Such reforms, coming so late in Britain’s ownership of the colony, naturally infuriated Beijing which proceeded to denounce Patten as a ‘strutting prostitute’, a ‘criminal of a thousand antiquities’ and a ‘tango dancer’. Nonetheless, the reforms had the strong endorsement of The Times, not only from its man on the spot, who knew Patten very well and got stories directly from him, but also at Wapping where the editor and the chief leader writer, Rosemary Righter, were keen to hold Beijing to account.

On 18 September 1995, Hong Kong’s first wholly elected Legislative Council ushered in a pro-democracy majority that put the colony on a likely collision course with her future overlords. The Beijing-backed and funded party won only seven of the sixty seats on the Legislative Council and Li Peng, the Chinese Prime Minister, insisted that his country would not abide by the result. Predictably, The Times’s leading article stated that the vote had vindicated Patten’s reforms.[34] From Beijing the talk was of reneging on the commitments in the 1984 declaration as well as replacing the elected Legislative Council with an appointed body. Describing China’s threats as ‘arrogant’, The Times backed John Major’s warning that Britain would involve her allies, the UN and the International Court of Justice, if China made any attempt to revoke the institutions and safeguards guaranteed by the 1984 Agreement.[35] Incurring the strong rebuke of the Chinese Ambassador, The Times also expressed intense hostility to China’s threats towards Taiwan, which in 1996 held its first democratic presidential elections (which Beijing interpreted as a step towards declaring the independence that Taiwan already effectively had in practice). Appealing to Clinton not to waver in the United States’ defence of Taiwanese integrity, the leading column made clear that ‘China is the provoker. The greatest risk lies in turning a blind eye.’[36]

In 1973, The Times had sponsored a politically ground-breaking exhibition of Chinese treasures at the Royal Academy. In September 1996 it did so again, by sponsoring The Mysteries of China at the British Museum. Featured were exhibits unearthed in recent archaeological discoveries from the Neolithic era of 4500 BC to the end of the Han dynasty in the third century AD. As part of the cultural exchange surrounding the Mysteries sponsorship, four board members of the People’s Daily were flown over at company expense. They were entertained at a Times reception at which John Major made a fleeting visit. After dinner, they were given a parting gift of that evening’s Times. It was, perhaps, an unfortunate present. On its inside pages were two stories about China, one by Bronwen Maddox headed ‘Clinton gambles on Far Eastern trade taming the tyranny of Peking’ and a second, by Mirsky, entitled ‘President warns China against bullying’.[37]

Although he had officially retired in 1990 and had been in uncertain health thereafter, the death in February 1997 of China’s ‘Paramount Leader’, Deng Xiaoping, was recognized as having far more than merely symbolic significance. A survivor of the Long March generation who had finally become unchallenged leader in 1978, Deng had straddled the contradictions of encouraging the private sector while retaining the iron commitment to one-party rule that guided the Tiananmen crackdown. The Times tried to do justice to both sides of his legacy. While there were doubts about which successors would establish themselves, the obituary hailed Deng as the saviour of the Communist Party and progenitor ‘over the most ambitious and successful market and free enterprise reforms ever undertaken by a socialist country’ which ensured ‘that millions of Chinese reaped tangible benefits’. Mirsky provided a lengthy assessment too, suggesting that Deng was not interested in ideas, and ‘probably went to his grave thinking that technology was the secret of Western power, a blindspot in the leader of a country which professed to be ideologically driven’. He was, Mirsky concluded, ‘like a Mafia capo di tutti capi, boss of bosses, who thought of China as Cosa Nostra, the Party’s creation, and was ready to crush under a tank any young man or women with a mimeograph who thought they could transform China – as Dr Mimeograph once dreamt of doing – and did’.[38]

Three months later, Stothard flew out to Beijing accompanied by Les Hinton, News International’s executive chairman, and James Pringle. There was a possibility that Stothard might be granted an interview with President Jiang Zemin. With Hong Kong’s handover just over a month away, this would have been a notable scoop for The Times. China’s leaders were not in the habit of offering impromptu interviews to foreign journalists and a request was made to see in advance what the questions would involve. Stothard submitted some proposals (the content of which had been suggested by Mirsky), adding that he wished the discussion to spread beyond them. In the event, President Jiang opted not to see The Times but Stothard was granted an audience with the deputy prime minister, Zhu Rongji, instead. He was duly invited into the Zhongnanhai, the enclosed complex of offices and gardens where the country’s leaders worked. Zhu could not have been more welcoming, even stating that he had been a reader of The Times since childhood and that its editor should feel free to ask whatever he liked, being, as he was, among friends. Possibly he did not appreciate that his guest accepted this courtesy literally. When the deputy prime minister provided reassurance that Hong Kong would enjoy press freedom under China’s rule, Stothard asked why, in that case, dissidents like Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan were imprisoned. Astonished, Zhu stood up and told him that was not the sort of question friends ask one another, reminding the editor that it was supposed to be a friendly chat not an inquisition. Within minutes the audience was over.[39] Stothard had not got his interview and when he returned to Wapping few of his colleagues were even aware that he had been in China at all.

On 30 June 1997, Hong Kong was duly handed over in a ceremony attended by Blair and the Prince of Wales. Save for a few isolated possessions, the event marked the end of the British Empire and The Times gave it the comprehensive treatment it deserved. Mirsky was the only journalist among the small group of well-wishers allowed onto the quayside to bid Patten farewell as he boarded the Royal Yacht Britannia with the Prince of Wales to sail off towards the Philippines. Barely an hour later, a Boeing 747 touched down at Kai Tak airport bearing President Jiang, the first chairman of the Chinese Communist Party to touch Hong Kong soil.

As The Times’s leader column noted, China’s future ascendancy would be dictated by how she responded to her new responsibility over the former colony.[40] Beijing did not want the liberal-minded elements in the Hong Kong success story to contaminate the Communist one-party state on the mainland. Hong Kong’s elected Legislative Council was immediately replaced with an appointed one in a ceremony controversially attended by Patten’s British critics, among them Sir Edward Heath and Lord (formally Sir Geoffrey) Howe. The reformers’ hope was that Beijing also recognized that it could not afford to kill its golden goose; on the eve of the handover Hong Kong was handling 60 per cent of external investment in China. A political crackdown could have serious economic consequences for the precedence was clear: the Hong Kong stock market had slumped 30 per cent on the news of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Hong Kong’s recession began the day after the RY Britannia passed beyond its harbour. Ironically, the downturn was caused not by China’s assumption of authority but by the Thai baht which collapsed on 2 July, bringing in its wake an Asia-wide financial crisis. A year after reunification with China, the Hong Kong stock market had halved in value. By then, Mirsky was back in London. Approaching retirement age and with the handover achieved, he had stepped down as South East Asia editor in November 1997. To his surprise, George Brock, The Times’s managing editor, asked him not to retire altogether and instead extended his contract so that he might continue to write on Chinese affairs for the paper.

Whatever awaited Hong Kong’s longer term future or how serious the immediate economic recession, the former colony did not experience the sudden Tiananmen-style bloodbath that some had feared. There seemed some possibility that the principle of one country, two systems might be acknowledged. Inevitably in this state of affairs, news stories about the province became less frequent – despite Mirsky’s attempts to get them in the paper – while attention switched to those parts of the world in greater crisis. Yet, for The Times and its Far East coverage, this was a brief lull before the storm for, early the next year, it found itself embroiled in a bitter dispute about its Chinese coverage and the behind-the-scenes dealing of its owner, Rupert Murdoch, which would do immense damage to the paper’s reputation.

In a pointed leader in June 1996, The Times had warned that China’s potential as a magnet for Western investment was making foreign leaders – in particular Helmut Kohl – wary of criticizing its record on human rights.[41] This was a brave observation given the commercial pressures on Rupert Murdoch to behave similarly. In 1993, he had bought Star television, a Hong Kong-based satellite broadcaster. The potential was enormous and with his investment in Sky starting to pay off in Britain, he announced that satellite television would prove ‘an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes’. Beijing promptly banned all private ownership of satellite dishes. This concentrated Murdoch’s mind. Shortly after the deal for Star TV went through, he sold Hong Kong’s leading English language newspaper, the South China Morning Post, to a Chinese-Malaysian tycoon. The paper, reputedly the most profitable in the world, was an influential voice in the region – Murdoch, indeed, had described it as ‘The Times of Southeast Asia’.[42] The sale was not without financial logic. News Corp. had bought it in 1987 for HK$ 2.4 billion and sold it six years later for HK$ 6 billion. The paper’s sale recouped two-thirds of the cost of buying Star, whose prospects would bloom if Beijing removed the obstacles to its expansion. It was widely assumed that jettisoning the South China Morning Post with its independent editorial line was one way in which Murdoch might bring about a more accommodating attitude from Beijing. This, at any rate, appeared to be his motivation when in 1994 he dropped BBC World Service TV from the Star TV satellite that was received into thirty-eight Asian countries. The decision to drop the BBC, which scandalized almost every section of the British media, went unrecorded in The Times.

This was not the only shortcoming in the paper’s reporting. Harper-Collins, the publishing house owned by News Corp., had commissioned Chris Patten to write East and West, an account of his governorship. It was due to be published in September 1998, but in July the previous year Murdoch had told HarperCollins executives that he thought it would be better if they paid Patten back his advance and suggested he took his book to another publisher. Murdoch was no fan of Patten’s politics and was anxious that the book’s publication would be interpreted as a declaration of hostility by the Chinese government. It was not a courageous position to adopt. The manner in which executives at HarperCollins implemented it made it look exceptionally inept. In February 1998 they dropped East and West with the phoney claim that it was too boring to be published. This flatly contradicted the opinion of the book’s editor, Stuart Profitt, who resigned and subsequently won compensation for constructive dismissal. All too predictably, the person least harmed by the fallout was Patten himself. HarperCollins had to pay him substantial damages and his book was published by Macmillan instead. For Murdoch, the financial penalty was paltry compared to the scale of the public relations disaster. Patten’s successful claim for damages dominated the news in the broadsheets. Beyond Wapping, Fleet Street was cock-a-hoop. ‘Murdoch is forced to apologise’ ran the Telegraph’s front-page headline with ill concealed glee. The Telegraph’s leading article overreached itself, accusing Murdoch of being ‘the biggest gangster of them all’. Nobody would have expected The Times to lead the denunciation, but its attempt to ignore the issue was a serious editorial misjudgment. Tardily, it reported the news on 28 February in an article that focused on News Corp.’s side of events. In consequence, it had opened itself up to allegations of self-censorship. These were not slow to materialize. The paper had never bid for the serial rights to East and West. This was a perfectly understandable decision that some now chose to construe as being done in deference to Murdoch. Stothard immediately rebutted the suggestion as ‘outrageous and absolutely not true’[43] but rival newspapers, under pressure from The Times’s cut in price, knew they had found a weapon with which to fight back. The issue threatened to seriously tarnish the paper’s principal asset – its credibility.

Stothard responded to criticisms over The Times’s inadequate coverage by admitting that he had misjudged the Patten book’s importance and in particular the level of attention competitors would give it. But he refuted any suggestion that he was acting on the proprietor’s orders – the subject, he said, had not even been touched upon in the telephone conversation he had had with Murdoch earlier in the week. Furthermore, he attempted to explain that because those tipping off the press had gone first with their stories to rival newspapers, The Times’s coverage had been less complete and had constantly struggled to catch up. He admitted, though, that of the many ‘difficult calls’ he had to make as editor, he had not called this one correctly.[44] Indeed, he had not. On 6 March, The Times’s media editor, Raymond Snoddy, wrote an article that confronted the problem. ‘No national newspaper in the UK covers its own affairs really well,’ he admitted. Guardian readers received little information about the manner of their paper’s purchase and financing of the Observer while the Independent was coy about its own attempts to squeeze out of business the Sunday competition. ‘Why, even The Times has been known, occasionally, to appear to avert its gaze when some activity of Mr Murdoch is being criticised by ill informed souls,’ wrote Snoddy with just a hint of whimsy before going on to suggest that the FT (his former employer) had the best record of independent judgment from the interests of its owners.[45] This certainly was objective journalism.

Nonetheless, with a price war in full cry, the Daily Telegraph had no intention of letting the matter pass. Under intense pressure from The Times’s fast-increasing sales, it began to run derogatory references to its rival and its owner as a matter of course. This quickly descended into crassness. A surprisingly lengthy report in the Telegraph’s news pages about Murdoch’s purchase of an American baseball team even suggested he might ‘vulgarise’ the Los Angeles Dodgers in the same way that he had The Times. A war of letters broke out between Stothard and the Telegraph’s editor, Charles Moore, after the latter took umbrage about an article by Brian MacArthur that pointed out the extent of the Telegraph’s gratuitous digs at its commercial rival.[46] The Telegraph, however, had another trump card to play – a disgruntled Times employee.

On 20 January 1998, Jonathan Mirsky had attended a round circle meeting of the Freedom Forum in London, an intimate gathering assembled for the benefit of a visiting group of young Chinese journalists. Told it was off the record, several of the British journalists there felt sufficiently relaxed to start bemoaning aspects of their own newspapers’ East Asian coverage. Emboldened, Mirsky duly joined in, giving vent to his frustrations that so much of his filed copy had never made it into The Times. Unfortunately for Mirsky, the supposedly off-the-record meeting was duly reported on the Freedom Forum’s website. What was worse, the website report left off the other journalists’ gripes about their employers except for what Mirsky had said about The Times – which was published in detail. He was accurately quoted as attributing his spiked copy to ‘the general junkification of the paper’ but also to his belief that it was done to protect the proprietor’s Far Eastern business empire. ‘The Times has finally decided, because of Murdoch’s interests, not to cover China in a serious way,’ Mirsky suggested. When a member of the audience questioned whether he was endangering his job with such criticisms, Mirsky waved the concern aside with the reply, ‘I’m too old and too famous for them to do something really terrible to me.’[47] This was rather naive.

For a while nothing happened. The website of the Freedom Forum was not a major Fleet Street news source. All this changed on the morning of 4 March 1998, when Mirsky got out of bed and went to his front door to pick up the newspapers. Across the front page of the Daily Telegraph ran the headline ‘Times man hits at censor Murdoch’. Hot on the heels of HarperCollins’s dropping of the Patten book, Mirsky’s quotes provided a great story for the press. The Telegraph devoted its lead editorial column to condemning The Times over what it decided was its failure to report the Patten fiasco fully and the allegations levelled by Mirsky. That the paper had been outspoken in its support for the Patten reforms was not mentioned. The Telegraph’s leading article ended with words that went beyond the usual badinage traded by rival papers: ‘Such suppression is not “a pretty minor story”, and anyone who thinks it is is well suited to work for Mr Murdoch, but not for a proper newspaper.’[48]

Mirsky had landed himself and his newspaper in a mess. He could not deny he had made his comments, or even that they had been misinterpreted. What he had said was accurately reported. He thus had to substantiate his claims. This he proceeded to do. The Times, he noted, had not interviewed the Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng when he visited London despite the fact that other broadsheets had done so. He also highlighted Stothard’s kowtowing to Beijing’s demand to know what questions he proposed asking President Jiang Zemin before an interview was granted, an action that had, in Mirsky’s inelegant expression, ‘lowered ourselves into our own toilet’.

Whatever the aversion to stoking an unseemly public squabble, Stothard had no option but to issue an immediate statement contradicting Mirsky’s allegations. ‘I have never taken an editorial decision to suit Mr Murdoch’s interests’ the editor declared, ‘nor have I ever been asked to.’ Spectators of the feud had to decide whether they trusted the editor’s word on this, given that he was hardly likely to announce he was the proprietor’s lackey, or the opinion of his China specialist who, having been several thousand miles away at the time, was not necessarily well placed to comment on office politics back home. Where Stothard was successful was in demonstrating where Mirsky lacked precision in his statement of the facts. His claim that The Times was downplaying stories about China and Hong Kong could hardly be made to fit the statistics. During 1997, the paper had run 218 articles on China (a figure that was comparable with the number published in the Telegraph). Of the 218 articles, Mirsky had written 124 and James Pringle, in Beijing, 94. Furthermore, The Times had run six leading articles on China or Hong Kong since May and not, as Mirsky asserted, none. There had also been no shortage of columnists on the Op-Ed page, most noticeably Bernard Levin, who had been unstintingly critical of the Beijing regime. Mirsky cited two occasions when he believed Stothard had personally spiked his articles shortly before he was due to meet Chinese officials in London.[49] Yet, in the context of the great volume of copy filed, this hardly suggested a concerted attempt from on high to silence the South East Asia editor.

Where Mirsky was correct was in his observation that the paper’s coverage of Hong Kong’s politics had fallen off since the handover of the colony. To this there was an obvious explanation – it was no longer such a major news story. Mirsky, however, believed there was considerable evidence of Chinese bad faith in the months after the handover and questioned the journalistic values that decided otherwise. He was frustrated that Stothard, and Graham Paterson, failed to see the worth in the articles he was proposing. Nonetheless, he had forty-eight articles published following the handover and, as has been noted, The Times chose to respond to Mirsky’s retirement in November 1997 not with a sigh of relief but with a fresh contract for him to continue writing on an occasional basis on Chinese affairs. Meanwhile, James Pringle was continuing to file from Beijing.

Re-examining The Times’s editorial stance on China for this volume, it is difficult to find evidence to support Mirsky’s serious allegations although it is understandable that competitors, in particular the Telegraph, chose to give the claims top billing. Certainly, Mirsky had filed a considerable amount of copy that had never made its way into the paper. This was not unusual for foreign correspondents, most of whose dispatches are never found the space to be published. As Stothard, who had filed his fair share of unused copy during his stint in Washington DC, put it, most foreign correspondents ‘have moments when they feel isolated from office life and see imagined reasons why their rivals’ copy should be preferred to their own’.[50] Mirsky was not only tremendously knowledgeable about his subject, but he was a noted journalist who had been named International Reporter of the Year for his coverage of the Tiananmen emergency. He could be forgiven for believing his unpublished copy had been spiked in deference to Rupert Murdoch rather than to the limitations of space. When even the literary editor, Erica Wagner, started turning down his offers to review books on subjects that he was eminently suited to write about, he had reason to suspect he had been effectively blacklisted. Stothard’s verdict was harsher. Most of Mirsky’s unpublished copy had not been used because the foreign desk and its subeditors thought it unusable. Whether this was a judgment on Mirsky or the editorial desks at Wapping was a matter of opinion.

It was an undignified end to Mirsky’s career at The Times. Despite the damage caused, George Brock did not want him to resign, not least because it would look as if he had been sacked. Nonetheless, go he did on 11 March, the day the paper’s board of independent directors met and concluded there was no substance in his allegations. Mirsky was rightly furious that they had come to this judgment without troubling to ask for his side of events. Brock had told him that he could not simultaneously stay on the paper while using its letters’ page to launch a frontal attack on its editorial integrity and so, when he was finally at liberty, the letters’ page published his rebuttal of Brian MacArthur’s claim that ‘he could not write in a journalistic manner’.[51] He turned down a sizeable sum from the Sunday Telegraph to rubbish his former employers, opting instead for a better-mannered explanation in the Spectator. Nonetheless, for the vast majority who did not read the paper and assumed its writer on Chinese affairs was a whistle-blower, the episode did immense damage to The Times’s reputation as an independent organ and once again raised the spectre of supposed editorial interference from the proprietor. In fact, the paper’s level of Chinese coverage owed rather more to the personal interests of its editor than the business concerns of its proprietor. The Times rediscovered a more consistent and critical tone towards China and the space to give it justice after 2002, when Stothard was succeeded as editor by Mirsky’s Tiananmen Square Samaritan, Robert Thomson, despite there being no change in the proprietor or the extent of his Far East business interests.[52]

VII

It was not long before New Labour found its funding arrangements subjected to the same scrutiny that had sliced through the Tories’ layer cake of sleaze. In November 1997 the Government’s intention to exempt Formula One from the forthcoming ban on tobacco advertising was questioned when it emerged that Formula One’s owner, Bernie Ecclestone, had given £1 million to the Labour Party. Two days before Christmas 1998, Peter Mandelson, the Trade and Industry Secretary, was forced to resign over the revelation that he had received an undeclared £373,000 home loan from Geoffrey Robinson, the Paymaster-General, whose complicated business affairs with the late Robert Maxwell were the subject of a DTI investigation. Robinson also had to resign. In 1999, Stothard was particularly outraged that the BBC governors should consider appointing Greg Dyke as the new director general of the BBC. Dyke had helped fund Blair’s party leadership election campaign and, to Stothard, this fatally compromised his suitability. In this, The Times stood shoulder to shoulder with William Hague who made submissions against the appointment. The campaign was in vain and in June, Dyke was appointed.

The financial and personal relationships between what the press were increasingly dubbing ‘Tony’s Cronies’ contrasted with the efforts the new Tory leadership claimed to be making to clean up the Conservatives’ act. During the Major Government, the Sunday Times had been to the fore in criticizing the clandestine way in which the Conservative Party solicited funds from shadowy individuals, particularly foreigners. When he became Tory leader in June 1997, William Hague had made clear the party would no longer accept foreign donations. Issuing its report the following year, the Neill Committee into standards in public life grappled with the issue of what constituted an overseas donor (and decided it was someone who was ineligible to be a British-registered voter) and recommended tight rules on trusts, requiring that they be ‘genuinely UK-based’ to qualify as a ‘permissible source’.

Legislation was proposed that would put the Neill Committee’s findings on a statutory basis but doubts remained whether the Conservatives really were, as Hague suggested, complying with the spirit of the proposals. In May 1999, Tom Baldwin arrived at The Times as its new deputy political editor, having made a name for himself over the previous two years at the Sunday Telegraph were he had helped to expose Ecclestone’s funding links with Labour. He had not even settled into his new berth before he was called upon to investigate a story that would pitch The Times and the Tories into a five-month war of words, recrimination and the prospect of a gruelling court case that threatened to bring down either Peter Stothard or William Hague.

‘Massive donations make Tories “the plaything of one man”’ ran The Times headline on 5 June 1999. In the article, Tom Baldwin reported that ‘two authoritative sources’ within the Conservative Party had told the paper that the party Treasurer, Michael Ashcroft, had been bankrolling the party to the tune of up to £360,000 a month. Baldwin speculated (inaccurately) that this represented an investment of about £4 million a year. It was not difficult to see why such a man would have been welcomed with open arms by Conservative Central Office. Having ploughed resources into an unwinnable 1997 general election campaign, the Tories had posted an £11 million deficit in 1998. Political disarray had lowered morale and donations had collapsed, creating a yawning chasm. The party certainly needed the largesse of generous friends like Michael Ashcroft to help fill it. However, Baldwin’s article suggested that this level of reliance upon one man was not only unhealthy but also stood to get worse. An unnamed official was cited as complaining that the party Treasurer’s ‘abrasive style and controversial reputation within the City’ was a reason for the reticence of other donors to come forward. ‘For every penny we don’t receive,’ the official was quoted as saying, ‘he becomes even more powerful. We cannot let the party become the plaything of just one man.’[53] The implication was clear: the once mighty Conservative Party had been sold at a rock bottom price to a person with a controversial business history who was known in the City as the ‘piranha’.

The Sunday Times had ranked Ashcroft Britain’s fourteenth richest man. Nonetheless, he spent much of the time out of the country. He was not only a resident of Florida and Belize but was the latter’s High Representative to the United Nations. Who was he and what was his motivation in bailing out the bankrupt Tories in Britain? So began a line of Times investigation that by its end had assumed the dimensions of a campaign or, to its critics, a witch hunt. At its heart were two questions. The first was whether Michael Ashcroft was using his role as Treasurer and principal donor to wield undue influence in the counsels of the Conservative Party. The Times never uncovered any evidence that this was the case. Indeed, those who worked at Conservative Central Office were certain that he did not.[54] At most, his political ambition appeared limited to the personal aspiration of a peerage. This was hardly a scandal. There was a long tradition that major political donors ended up being ennobled sooner or later although Ashcroft’s prospects did not look good – the political honours scrutiny committee had already rejected him once. The second contention was the one upon which the paper chose to focus. Ashcroft was reckoned to be a billionaire and was viewed in the City by some with circumspection. As a Belize-based tax exile he lived in a country with notorious lax rules in financial matters. Attempts to tighten Belize’s rules had been thwarted by the country’s ruling People’s United Party which he helped fund. He enjoyed extraordinary concessions there. To Stothard, it seemed ‘a little odd to us that William Hague should appoint to the Tory party Treasurership a man who not only spent most of his time abroad and paid his taxes abroad but was a fully accredited official of a left-wing government’. It was, he later reiterated, ‘an absolute issue of public interest to pursue this’.[55]

Pursue it The Times conscientiously proceeded to do. Ashcroft’s route to extraordinary personal wealth had been a rocky one. Self-made and eschewing university or the social connections of the City Establishment (in itself, perhaps a reason why he was treated with some lofty suspicion), he had accumulated his first million by the age of thirty-one. Inevitably, such a man could not fail to make enemies along the way. He had been criticized by a Department of Trade and Industry report into the Blue Arrow affair and had aroused suspicions by basing his operations like ADT and Carlisle Holdings in offshore tax havens. The Times’s reporter, Damian Whitworth, was dispatched to Belize to snoop around. He was staggered by the extent of the Tory Treasurer’s business influence in the country and noted the general impression of the locals that he was ‘the big man in town’.[56] The paper also sent Dominic Kennedy to Panama in the hope of uncovering further evidence of Ashcroft’s financial interests. Important leads started to come in from other sources. The Times was passed copies of official Foreign Office documents. These were published over the front page on 13 July. One, dating from October 1996, had been written by Charles Drace-Francis, who was then head of the West Indian and Atlantic Department at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It stated that Ashcroft, ‘now has about $1 billion in cash and would obviously like to have his own bank to put it in – but cannot use the Belize Bank’. A second was a telegram the following April from the British High Commissioner in Belize referring to the difficulty of knowing whether to believe the ‘rumours about some of Ashcroft’s business dealings’.[57]

The Times now felt it was in a position to become more aggressive in tone. ‘Is it without significance that such a man would resist regulations intended to tackle crime because his own financial interests, albeit legitimate, might suffer?’ the leading article posed in relation to how Belize’s lax regulations made it conducive to drug- and money-laundering operations.[58] David Mackilligin, the former High Commissioner to Belize, wrote a letter to The Times calling on William Hague to launch his Ethics and Integrity Committee enquiry into the activities of a man who ‘cannot escape responsibility for establishing a system that makes Belize a much more tempting target for drug-runners’.[59] Hague was certainly in an unenviable position. The stream of criticism against his party Treasurer appeared to link the Tories in the public mind with the sort of sleaze that the new Conservative leader had stated was in the past. Yet, the party’s precarious finances would be further imperilled were he to ditch Ashcroft. Indeed, without the backing of Ashcroft’s millions, there were fears that the party’s line of credit would expire altogether. Hague opted to resist rather than succumb to the demands for an enquiry, choosing instead to echo Ashcroft’s claim that he was the victim of a ‘smear’. The Tory chairman, Michael Ancram, also went on the offensive claiming a ‘political campaign’ was being waged against the party and challenged the paper to divulge how many of its supposedly incriminating documents came from political appointees within the Government.[60] Ancram’s anger was understandable. The other newspapers had started to follow The Times’s lead and, although the Daily Telegraph stood somewhat aloof, were generally supporting the call to probe further.

Worse was to follow. Independently of The Times’s probe, Toby Follett, a freelance journalist, had been working on an investigation for Channel 4. He contacted the paper suggesting they pooled their resources. He had a source in the US Drug Enforcement Administration. The first results appeared across the front page of the paper of Saturday 17 July, with the revelation that Ashcroft’s name was among those that appeared in four separate reports by the US Drug Enforcement Administration into possible drug smuggling and money laundering in Belize. Readers who persevered with the article, written by Tom Baldwin and Andrew Pierce, would have noted that Ashcroft had never even been interviewed and no charges had been brought against him. But the headline and its implications raised the temperature between the warring factions. For those for whom the slightest whiff of smoke necessarily pointed to a blazing inferno, this certainly sounded suspicious. The Times did, however, hold the presses and print Ashcroft’s furious rebuttal, ‘I make this categorical statement: I have never been involved in drug trafficking or money-laundering. My business affairs are entirely proper and no amount of smear, rumour or innuendo will alter that fact.’ He continued that he was adding The Times to his list of enemies and that having set up ‘Crimestoppers’ in 1987, an organization that had been responsible for 29,000 arrests, ‘I clearly do not condone wrongdoing’.[61]

The Times, however, was beginning to mine a deep seam with the DEA’s reports on Belize. It showed a Labour MP, Peter Bradley, its DEA copies and on 21 July he used parliamentary privilege to cite their contents on the floor of the House of Commons. The Times published his speech verbatim. The imputation some wanted to make from the content was clear when another Labour MP with a more outspoken record, Dennis Skinner, caused uproar in the Commons chamber by declaiming without any concrete evidence, ‘The Tory Opposition are receiving a million pounds a year from one of the biggest drug-runners in the West.’[62] That very day, Ashcroft issued a writ for libel against The Times, Stothard, Baldwin and Follett, accusing them of ‘perhaps the most one-sided, partial and coloured account of anyone’s affairs ever produced by a newspaper in a free country’. The most famous libel lawyer in the country, George Carman QC, accepted Ashcroft’s brief. Geoffrey Robertson QC stood poised and ready to defend News International’s corner. The legal and media worlds prepared themselves for what was immediately billed as ‘the clash of the titans’ and the most expensive libel trial in history. A figure of £100 million total costs was plucked from nowhere and was soon repeated as if it was the predetermined fee. Yet there was hardly a need for exaggeration. Whatever the final rate, either The Times or the Conservative Party’s Treasurer faced a massive bill and a ruined reputation.

Did The Times have its own agenda, as Ashcroft and Ancram alleged? Day after day, the paper was giving massive coverage to its investigation. Those who had been on the paper in 1982 might have recalled the moment when Rodney Cowton challenged the then editor Harold Evans that he appeared to be running a ‘campaign’. The issue then had been lead in petrol. Seventeen years on, the attack launched by Stothard, Evans’s protégé, was far more personal. The prominent role in the reporting taken by Tom Baldwin was commented upon adversely by those with partisan suspicions. Whatever his well-established talents as a news bloodhound, he was known to be unsympathetic to the Conservatives. Ben Preston, the son of the former Guardian editor, Peter Preston, had taken over as news editor and was also assumed to be no Tory die-hard. An official in the Foreign Office was supposed to have leaked documents to the paper. Where there political forces at work behind the scenes? And why was the paper sharing some of its documentation with the Labour Member of Parliament for The Wrekin? Whatever Baldwin’s links with the Downing Street press office, the evidence that The Times was doing the Labour Government’s bidding was, however, hard to sustain. It had just endorsed voting Tory in the European parliamentary elections and had vehemently opposed Greg Dyke, a man who helped fund Blair’s leadership campaign, being appointed as the BBC’s directorgeneral.[63] Those who assumed the campaign against Ashcroft was a politically-motivated assault on the integrity of the Conservative Party might have been surprised to learn that the initial motivation appeared to come not from Wapping’s New Labour admirers but from those with Tory leanings. The domestic politics leader writer, Tim Hames, and George Bridges, a young recruit to the leader team who had been a speechwriter for John Major, were among those who had mentioned the concerns they had heard about Ashcroft’s role as the party’s banker of first and last resort. They were reporting worries expressed to them by senior Conservative contacts, not from anyone on the left. Nor were they alone. Stothard remained on good terms with leading Conservative politicians on the modernizing wing of the party. Whether from a high-minded opposition to the party becoming ‘the plaything’ of a wealthy businessman or from a political desire to undermine Hague, they voiced to the editor their concerns about the Tory Treasurer. Stothard fully recognized that the campaign would damage the Tory leadership and that this might help Labour in the short term, but he believed that in opposing an overconcentration of power in one man, the paper was doing the Tories a favour in the longer term. This assumed that kicking the party when it was down was the best way to restore it to its feet.[64] Yet, aside from the journalistic urge to get to the truth, it was not hard to understand why Stothard pursued the matter. Ashcroft was not the only one over whom a cloud of suspicion hung. Ignoring the rumours, Hague was also standing by Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare as the party’s prospective candidate for the London mayoral election. ‘The role of kept woman is never dignified but the Tory party is playing particularly fast and loose in its choice of sugar daddy,’ added Michael Gove in his column, proceeding also to admonish the influence of Archer as another ‘opportunist who gave the Tory party a whiff of the casbah’. It saddened Gove that, ‘The party once ruined by Mandy Rice-Davies is now behaving like her.’[65]

Not everyone at The Times was happy with the manner in which the campaign was developing. Having been present when the match was lit, Tim Hames increasingly occupied himself on issues that allowed him to stand well back from the coming explosion. The deputy editor, John Bryant, had early on decided that the paper was becoming fixated with its anti-Ashcroft campaign and was losing a sense of proportion in its attempts to get him. In particular, he was uneasy about relying on Toby Follett for information. Stothard, however, would not be reined in. Any hope that the paper might call off its attack had already collapsed. Acting in a private capacity, the PR guru Lord (Tim) Bell had arranged for Stothard to meet Ashcroft over breakfast at the Savoy. The meeting had been civil, with the Tory Treasurer explaining how he was seeking to introduce financial prudence into the free-spending environment of Conservative Central Office. Yet, essentially a man with a shy manner, he did not handle his case with much subtlety. He was reluctant to give The Times an on-the-record interview. When the paper asked the Conservative Party questions about financing, its requests were forwarded to Ashcroft’s lawyers. Not only did this appear suspiciously defensive, it tended to re-enforce the allegation that the Party was indeed his personal fiefdom.

Probing by The Times caused the Conservative Party further embarrassment in November when the paper revealed that the party bank account was receiving around £1 million a year in direct transfers from funds in Ashcroft’s Belize Bank Trust Company. The Neill Committee had ruled that this means of payment fell into the category of a foreign donation and a draft bill was being drawn up to make it illegal. It was certainly at odds with the statement the party had made to the Neill Committee the previous year when it claimed it had not received any foreign donations since the general election. The Times’s revelation forced Conservative Central Office to admit it was using different guidelines to those set out by Neill. Whether the Neill Committee had grasped that the Tories were using their own different criteria when they made their original boast that they were complying with a no-foreign-donations policy was another matter.[66] What especially alarmed Michael Ancram was the question of how The Times had gained access to information on private Conservative Party bank account details. Claiming that it ‘appeared to be the latest of a series of dirty tricks being perpetrated by those who will stop at nothing in order to keep this government in power’ he asked the Metropolitan Police to investigate who had hacked into the bank accounts.[67] Stothard denied the paper had been involved in any such impropriety. This was, technically, true. To help its defence against the libel suit, it had hired private detectives to investigate Ashcroft and had not chosen to get involved in the methods by which they obtained results.

Ashcroft appeared to believe that The Times – lacking hard information to accuse him of being a money launderer or drugs trafficker – was instead printing titbits from Drugs Enforcement Administration files in a manner intended to create a climate of guilt by association. Rejecting Ashcroft’s interpretation, The Times’s defence was that it was reporting facts and matters about which the public had a right to know. It was merely and quite properly drawing attention to questions that needed to be answered by a person in his position. Yet stating that he had been named in four separate DEA reports had little meaning if the references did not include specific allegations. What The Times did publish certainly looked like scraps: a drugs dealer, Thomas Ricke, had channelled some of his ill-gotten gains through the Belize Bank that Ashcroft controlled; Ashcroft had been seen boarding a plane that the DEA believed had been used in drugs operations (although he had innocently hired the plane from a leasing company). The question remained whether these apparent coincidences merited the extensive billing the paper was giving them. Ashcroft asked The Times to print the DEA files unedited and in full. The Times failed to do so.[68]

Whatever the eventual verdict, a court case was going to be cripplingly expensive. The risk of defeat for The Times was a terrifying prospect while Ashcroft could only win after a lengthy period in which every aspect of his business empire – no matter how innocent – would come under detailed scrutiny. It was not as if winning hundreds of thousands of pounds in damages – which he described as ‘petty cash’ – was vital to him. He was, after all, a billionaire. What was important for both his business and personal interests was for his name to be cleared of the serious imputations contained by The Times’s leaking of DEA files. The allegations were, it seems, putting business pressure on him from banks reluctant to roll over loans until his name had been cleared. There were other pressures on him, including his desire for a peerage, which demanded a compromise solution rather than risk more in the public glare of the High Court. Hague’s loyalty towards him was steadfast – or, as The Times saw it, unquestioning. As Ashcroft later confirmed, Hague ‘made clear a newspaper was not going to hound me out. He never put pressure on me.’[69] Yet it was certainly not in the Conservative Party’s interest for courtroom claims and counterclaims to keep the story in the news, stretching (with George Carman’s temporary indisposition) towards the next general election. The party already had enough bad courtroom publicity to contend with from Jonathan Aitken, Neil Hamilton and Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare. Allegations of sleaze had contributed to one general election humiliation and Hague did not wish a second election campaign to be similarly derailed. Murdoch too had no more desire than anyone else to fight a long war of attrition that risked the reputation of his flagship newspaper when a propitious and satisfactory truce could save all the combatants a great deal of hardship. One possibility was to get the respective legal teams to thrash out a compromise. A cheaper and perhaps less protracted alternative was to find an honest broker who would bring Murdoch and Ashcroft together as two men of the world having a tycoon-to-tycoon discussion about how the unfortunate matter might be settled amicably. Jeff Randall, a former Sunday Times executive who was editor of the Sunday Business, offered himself in this role and it was he who brought Murdoch and Ashcroft together. Preliminary positions established, Murdoch referred a formula to Stothard for his comments and approval and their respective fax machines rumbled into life. Stothard was hosting a reception for Times colleagues at the Reform Club when a waiter arrived with a card marked ‘urgent message’. It announced that a Mr Michael Ashcroft, in New York, wished to speak to him on the telephone.

Peace was declared in time for Christmas. On the paper’s front page of 9 December 1999 ran a 347-word statement under the headline ‘The Times and Michael Ashcroft: Correction.’ Three brief paragraphs – including the statement that ‘the issues raised by The Times have resulted in a substantive and useful debate on foreign donations to political parties’ – built up to the denouement: ‘The Times is pleased to confirm that it has no evidence that Mr Ashcroft or any of his companies have ever been suspected of money laundering or drug-related crimes.’ The paper applauded the announcement that the Tory Treasurer would be reorganizing his affairs in order to return to live in Britain. Ashcroft recognized ‘the public concern about foreign funding of British politics’ while ‘the openness and accountability of political funding by all parties will remain a central issue for investigation and comment by The Times’. The notice ended, ‘With this statement, The Times intends to draw a line under the “The Ashcroft Affair”. Litigation between the parties has been settled to mutual satisfaction, with each side bearing its own costs.’[70]

‘To draw a line’ was an interesting phrase. As was quickly spotted, there was no word of apology or retraction. Ashcroft was dropping his litigation for damages and an order for his legal costs. The declaration that the paper had no evidence of criminality was, after all, no more than a statement of fact. It was the perceived hint of innuendo that had provoked Ashcroft into issuing a writ. Those looking for a victor were better advised to conclude that neither of the protagonists had lost. With consummate diplomacy, Jeff Randall declared it ‘an honourable score draw’.[71] Surprisingly, this was not quite the end of the matter as far as The Times was concerned. Follow-up investigations started before the settlement in December were only finally put on hold after the Tory Treasurer threatened to sue for breach of contract. In the short term, Ashcroft’s reputation recovered: when news broke that he had settled with The Times, shares in his public company Carlisle Holdings leapt, making him £36 million richer than he had been the day before. In the longer term, he made other gains. In March 2000, he was finally cleared for a peerage after agreeing to move to Britain and renounce his post as Belizean ambassador to the UN. In October he took his seat in the House of Lords as Lord Ashcroft of Belize. Three years later he gained access under the Data Protection Act to fifty-six files held by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development which included derogatory and unfounded comments. The departments issued a formal apology and agreed to pay considerable costs.[72] Others fared less well. Following an enquiry, Drace-Francis departed from the Foreign Office and subsequently got a job in an Edinburgh kilt shop. Jonathan Randel, a US drugs agency analyst working in Atlanta, was charged with selling classified documents to Toby Follett (who then passed them to The Times; the paper admitted paying Randel’s expenses) and in 2003 was sentenced in an Atlanta court to a year in jail.[73]

How the reputation of The Times emerged from the imbroglio was hotly debated. In the sense that it had never directly alleged anything that it had to retract, its investigation could not be faulted. It had shone a light on an important and – until that moment – underanalysed figure in British politics, asking valid questions about the manner in which he related his Conservative Party role with his financial arrangements and commitments to another government. The investigation had commenced with genuinely proper motives. The speed with which it uncovered information of an interesting and at times headline-grabbing nature (especially in regard to the DEA references) had, however, encouraged what, from a more objective standpoint, appeared to be a less than appropriate tone. Indeed, the coverage developed a hectoring tendency that gave the impression the hunt was being pursued with a sense of gleeful expectation. Articles by Tory-minded journalists and by the editor himself explaining that the motives were high-minded and not politically partisan were lost amid this raucous tenor. The Times had published eighty-one articles relating to the Ashcroft affair in the forty-seven days between the paper making its first foray and its report that Ashcroft was suing for libel. By the time a legal settlement had been reached in December, the tally had almost reached 170. More than thirty of these articles had been splashed across the front page. This was a lot of coverage for a man who had not been charged with any crime and, but for the paper’s campaign, was not a publicly well-known figure.

Critics felt that the sheer ferocity with which Ashcroft was pursued smacked of the worst excesses of ‘attack journalism’. They believed the patient sniffing of the bloodhound had given way to the snarling aggression of the Rottweiler. There were a small number of examples in the paper’s history where it had adopted this approach with the intention of exposing wrongdoing, but, generally speaking, the Ashcroft affair was a noticeable departure from the paper’s tradition. Once the paper was under threat of a potentially crippling legal writ, the determination to look under every stone overwhelmed other considerations. Information had been shared between Tom Baldwin and Government and parliamentary sources in a manner that made The Times look as if it was in cahoots with a Labour conspiracy against the Tory Treasurer. A major problem was that The Times had less experience than some other newspapers in running this kind of personal investigation and found itself relying on private investigators and other third parties. They employed methods of gathering information that risked tarnishing – by association – the name of a reputable newspaper. It certainly was not consistent with the measured reporting of established fact associated with being the journal of record. Those who believed this tag had long prevented the paper from fulfilling its proper role to search out truth through disclosure and investigation were delighted. To them, the old reticence had merely made it the lapdog of the powerful. Stothard was named the 1999 Editor of the Year and The Times the Newspaper of the Year at the What the Papers Say awards. It was a high note upon which to end the century. Applauding its ‘world-class credentials’, the judges commended it for getting ‘a taste for setting the news agenda’. The Ashcroft saga was part of this, the citation stating admiringly: ‘having got the story, The Times just wouldn’t shut up. Even when Ashcroft issued a writ for libel, the paper and its editor carried on.’ The result had been to give the Conservative Party ‘a bloody nose’.[74] Trying to affect an air of congratulation was the award’s presenter, William Hague.

VIII

Stothard had certainly shown the courage of his reporters’ convictions in pursuing the Ashcroft story in the face of the threat of legal action that, had Ashcroft won, could have cost News International (or, rather, its insurers) tens of millions of pounds in damages and costs. Such a result would have ensured not only the abrupt termination of Stothard’s editorship but, more importantly, it would have inflicted a wound to his paper’s integrity (and its parent company’s interest in continuing to bail it out) from which it would have difficulty recovering. That he remained the undaunted journalist in pursuit of the story despite these pressures was a testament to his extraordinary audacity and tenacity. Had The Times lost in the High Court, this courage would have been decried as criminal recklessness with the fate of a great and famous newspaper.

Instead, The Times faced the new century with confidence, producing an outstanding edition for the millennium complete with a section in which the paper’s senior writers cast their eyes over the circuitous march of civilization, the point reached, and, more speculatively, the path ahead. It was the Whig interpretation of history writ large. It was also an exceptionally impressive product.

Stothard returned to his office in January 2000 with every reason to feel confident. Those outside the inner circle wondered how much longer he would last in the chair. Murdoch’s previous Times editors had lasted one year, three years, five years and two years respectively. Stothard was now in his eighth year. The impression that the deal to end the Ashcroft affair had been done by the trio of Murdoch, Jeff Randall and the Tory Treasurer without final reference to the Times’s editor led rival newspapers to assume there had been a proprietorial withdrawal of confidence. Nothing could have been further from the truth, as Murdoch assured him. It was on the assumption that he had a lengthy future ahead, rather than through any intimations of mortality, that he reshuffled his inner cabinet. The great casualty was the deputy editor, John Bryant. A man of wide-ranging interests and great professional competence, Bryant’s heart had not been in the Ashcroft affair and this may have rankled with Stothard. It was an abrupt end to ten years of stalwart service. Stothard, however, felt that it was time for a change. Like Rees-Mogg before him, he was not the sort of editor who believed it necessary to hover around the backbench until midnight. Instead, he had been content to concentrate on the argumentative rather than strictly factual parts of the paper and to leave the office shortly after, or even before, the first edition had gone to press. Thus, much of the task of organizing and bringing out the news pages of the paper had been in the hands of David Ruddock and John Bryant who worked late into the night. The recent departure of Ruddock had prompted Stothard to express the desire to ‘take back control’ of the paper and his decision to sack Bryant can best be understood as part of this process. The young, calm and collected home news editor, Ben Preston, ascended into Bryant’s vacated position. In Preston’s place, Michael Gove, now thirty, became home news editor and Graham Paterson stepped into Gove’s shoes to run Op-Ed. Invariably there was gossip that Stothard was attempting to set up the succession with either Gove or Preston emerging to take the crown according to how they performed with their new responsibilities. Both were still extraordinarily young to be in such positions of seniority. That Preston, aged only thirty-six, was to be deputy editor after only seven years with the paper (initially as an education reporter) was a clear sign of favour. Others read the reshuffle differently and believed Stothard was giving Gove – a strategist at home in the officers’ mess environment of the leader writers and columnists – the opportunity to earn his campaign medals commanding the infantry battalions of the news room.

These ruminations gathered momentum when, in March 2000, Stothard suddenly announced he was ‘taking time off to work on special projects’. It was suggested that he was going to look into internet operations. There was immediate speculation that this was one of Murdoch’s euphemisms for giving him the sack. Those who had been around in 1990 remembered when Charlie Wilson had been put in charge of East European acquisitions. An almost audible whoop of delight could be heard from Conservative Central Office whose denizens assumed they had claimed his scalp and that the final score in the Ashcroft affair was that Ashcroft remained as Treasurer and Stothard was sacked as editor. BBC Radio 4’s Today programme reported this claim as if it was established fact. Rival newspapers assessed the runners and riders for his job. The speed with which speculation was reported as fact ably demonstrated the unprofessional shortcomings of too much modern opinion-driven journalism.[75] It did, however, force to the surface the truth. Having hoped to keep the matter to the privacy of his immediate family since being diagnosed in February, a reluctant Stothard was forced to stand on a chair in the newsroom and tell his stunned colleagues the truth. He had to undergo chemotherapy for a neuroendocrine tumour of the pancreas. He would be back.[76]

To his dejected staff Stothard offered a cheerful prognosis of his recovery prospects but the truth was that he was stepping into lightly chartered medical territory. The form of cancer was a rare one and opinion was divided on the treatment. Some specialists even counselled against chemotherapy in favour of a policy of wait and see. Stothard opted to risk a more proactive line of assault on the tumour. There was no certainty that he would recover. He was, at forty-nine, one year older than Charles Douglas-Home had been when a tumour claimed him. It was in such a situation that the editor of The Times could take comfort in the attitude of the proprietor. As Douglas-Home’s family could attest, Murdoch’s fidelity was at its most steadfast when assisting highly regarded colleague in such circumstances. Stothard also received the unwavering support of Les Hinton, News International’s executive chairman. The longer he was away from Wapping, the more important this was since it dampened down unhelpful and destabilizing speculation.

There was no favourable moment to be confronted by a potentially fatal tumour but the timing was particularly unfortunate given that Stothard had just embarked upon new ventures that needed paternal guidance. One was the launch on 13 March 2000 of Times2 (subsequently shortened to T2) a tabloid-sized features section modelled on the highly successful G2 section of the Guardian. Attempts to learn lessons from the Daily Mail’s appeal to women readers by improving the quality of features had met with mixed results. Christina Appleyard and Sandra Parsons had been hired from the Mail to improve The Times’s offering. Having learned her craft in the Mail’s abrasive environment, Appleyard’s style caused friction with her new colleagues and she departed amid some acrimony. Sandra Parsons, however, proved a popular and accomplished recruit whose infectious enthusiasm and natural talents were soon evident in the marked improvement in the features pages. Stothard believed that she needed a less cramped canvas to display her work. He envisaged a section that would become a new focal point for women readers (as the sports section was for men) while also providing the space for lengthier and more substantial essays and reportage – the sort of journalism that had a structured beginning, middle and an end – for which the news pages had never provided a sympathetic neighbourhood. This was a major and expensive innovation (it assumed yet greater significance when, four years later, the whole paper went tabloid) that involved new deadlines and printing arrangements. Unfortunately, it commanded little support from management. Not only did its launch coincide with a downturn in the advertising market, but the advertising department chose to concentrate its sales efforts elsewhere. In its first months and with Stothard hors de combat, Times2 struggled to assert its identity, unsure whether it was the depository of weighty storytelling or a conveyor belt for lifestyle features. Such indecision hampered attempts to hook a core readership. Preston did his best to support it, but the enormous range of responsibilities suddenly foisted upon him meant he could not devote as much energy to it as it needed. In this respect, Stothard’s absence in its crucial first months undoubtedly contributed to its unsettled infancy by denying Sandra Parsons the well-placed advocate she needed at a time when the new section faced indifference from many news-focused journalists and a management busy battening down the hatches as the advertising recession began to hit. This was the economic force that also meant that the old business and sport second section had to be integrated back into a single main broadsheet section. This was not a satisfactory solution, as the mounting number of letters from businessmen made all too clear.

These were new and serious structural problems that would have taxed even an editor of Stothard’s experience. Instead they fell to the acting editor, Ben Preston. Preston had only been deputy editor for a fortnight when Stothard had started disappearing for long and unexplained periods. No less alarmingly, Preston had barely enjoyed his new elevation for six weeks before he found himself running the paper outright. The role of acting editor would have been difficult even for a man with decades of executive-level familiarity. It involved all the responsibilities of the editor’s job while denying the opportunity to make major long-term strategic decisions. Murdoch certainly saw no reason to distract the new man at the helm. Indeed, Preston was several months into his period in charge before the occasion of the annual News International budget discussions provided him with an opportunity to discuss developments with the proprietor face to face. At any rate, his primary task was thus not to take the paper down new and exciting avenues or to recreate it according to his own perceptions so much as to keep it on an even keel until such time as Stothard might return. In the circumstances, he performed his task with remarkable assurance. The two men were different in so far as Preston’s chief focus was the news pages while Stothard’s great loves were books, leaders and comment. Yet, had they not been told, few readers in the twelve months between March 2000 and 2001 would have had any reason to suspect their paper’s fortunes was being directed not by its official editor but by a young deputy who had been thrown in at the deep end. Among his most important contributions, Preston impressed his journalists by a calm, unflappable demeanour that was an important asset during a period of uncertainty.

While Stothard had drawn a line under the Ashcroft affair, Preston presided over a period in which the Conservative Party battled in vain to regain the confidence of The Times, let alone the wider public. Hague continued to be dogged by questions over his judgment. With Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare’s disgrace following false alibi claims, there was no shortage of commentators who asserted Hague had brought the disaster upon himself. The general view was that he should never have allowed a man over whom there had long hung such a cloud of suspicion to stand as the party’s London mayoral candidate. Liberal opinion was also unimpressed when, in April 2000, he responded to the jailing of Tony Martin – who had shot dead an unarmed intruder in his farmhouse – by calling for the law to be strengthened to support those defending their property. Four months later, Hague’s boast in GQ magazine that he regularly drank fourteen pints a day as a teenager was treated with the same derision as had been meted out to an earlier trip to the funfair for which the Tory leader had donned a baseball hat with his name on it.

In July 1998, The Times had set out its attitude to the party in a long leading article written by Michael Gove entitled ‘Mods and Rockers’. It made clear that, ‘If the Tories are to win office, then liberals must first win the battle of ideas within their party. In this conflict, The Times is a committed supporter of those who lead the liberal charge.’ A telling sign of which side MPs were on could be discerned by whether they supported an equal age of consent for homosexuals and heterosexuals, the article argued. On this, as in other areas, including the reform of the House of Lords, the party would be better engaged working to make change acceptable rather than being sidelined in pointless opposition:

Wise Conservatives deal with the world as it is, not as it should be or once was. They respect the changing landscape and are sensitive to its contours. Having spent the Eighties telling other British institutions that they must adapt to compete the Tories must now make the same transition.[77]

The paper recognized that, however tentatively, Hague was nudging his party in a more modern direction. However, the great hope for revival was the subject of Gove’s biography, Michael Portillo. Since losing his supposedly safe seat in the most celebrated moment of the 1997 general election, the flamboyant Anglo-Spaniard had undergone a period of reflection and conversion, emerging as a liberal-minded figure well suited to the image-driven priorities of the media glare. When, in September 1999, Alan Clark died, creating a vacancy in the Tory’s safest and most sophisticated seat, Kensington and Chelsea, all eyes turned to Portillo. Three days later, The Times made an extraordinary scoop when in an interview, Ginny Dougray coaxed from him an admission that he had ‘homosexual experiences’ as an undergraduate at Peterhouse.[78] The next day he put himself forward for the Kensington and Chelsea constituency. This was certainly a test of the party’s liberal sympathies and his subsequent election suggested the Tories might indeed be proceeding along the route that Stothard, Gove and Tim Hames hoped would ensure their recovery.

By then, the expectations invested in Portillo were all the greater because of waning confidence in Hague. The belief that the Tory leader was gradually shifting the party towards fresh and open-minded thinking had been dashed on the back of an apparent success. In June 1999 the Tories had gained the most number of seats in the European elections. It was not a portent of great things: only a third of Britons had troubled themselves to vote and those who did were assumed to be marking their dislike either as a mid-term protest vote against Blair or Brussels, or both. Nonetheless, Hague interpreted his party’s relative success in the poll as a sign that, by appealing to the core vote, the Tories could at least regain some of the ground they had ceded during the Major years. He reshuffled the Shadow Cabinet towards the right, sacking Peter Lilley and bringing in Ann Widdecombe as Health spokeswoman. Widdecombe had a following among some party members although her abrasive style was hardly atuned to winning over moderate opinion. When, in October 2000, she called for on-the-spot fines for casual drug users, even her fellow Shadow Cabinet colleagues torpedoed her policy by stepping forward to confess to youthful experiments with cannabis. A strategy of enthusing party members at the expense of the uncommitted multitudes was, in any case, a sign of limited ambition. In April, The Times revealed that Conservative Party membership had fallen to 325,000, a figure that was the lowest since the First World War.[79]

By the time Stothard was welcomed back into the editor’s chair, in March 2001, fully restored in health and vigour, the last embers of warmth for the Conservative Party appeared to have gone out from within him during his period of convalescence. Serious illness had softened his admiration for the practical and goal-getting Tory mentality. He appeared increasingly sympathetic to those who talked a more collectively minded language.

While the attack on the Government continued on the Op-Ed pages from the paper’s conservative columnists, Gove, Parris and Rees-Mogg, rival newspapers regarded the treatment Downing Street received on the news pages as perhaps the most generous in Fleet Street. Alastair Campbell appeared to be more comfortable trusting Philip Webster and Tom Baldwin with exclusive information than most of their broadsheet competition. Inevitably, this caused some inter-newspaper jealousy and it was not long before Webster and Baldwin were being accused of painting Government policies in a favourable light in return for scoops. Such was the supposed favouritism that when Webster was given the scoop that the Queen would be appointing Andrew Motion as the next Poet Laureate – a leak that did not amuse Buckingham Palace – rivals wrongly assumed that he had been fed the information directly from Downing Street.[80]

There was a long tradition of Prime Ministerial press officers showing partiality towards journalists with whom a rapport had been developed while cold-shouldering those who had been marked out as hostile commentators. The Blair administration, however, was the most adept – or shameless – exponent. The belief that Webster and, in particular, Baldwin, allowed themselves to get too close to Campbell in return for disclosures was a damaging accusation refuted primarily by the Downing Street press secretary’s complaints about the treatment the Government received in The Times’s reporting. This had started long before either Blair or Campbell had gained the keys to Downing Street. On the backbench, David Ruddock had frequently had to endure Campbell telephoning, often several nights a week, to complain about what he had just read in the first edition. Ruddock would explain that he would investigate the complaint and report back. Almost invariably, the story would prove accurate but this would not prevent a tirade of hectoring invective down the telephone line from Campbell. In the meantime, Ruddock would find PA wires being published announcing that The Times had withdrawn their allegations when the paper had done no such thing. ‘He was such a bore and a bully,’ Ruddock recalled of Campbell’s nocturnal menaces, ‘that I ended up refusing to speak to him.’[81] The frequency and the vitriolic manner of expression were much worse than The Times experienced from any previous party press office. It far exceeded the efforts even of Bernard Ingham, the unabashed press voice of Margaret Thatcher, and bore no relation whatsoever to the muted tone occasionally emitted from Major’s team.

The impression that the Government was more spin than substance was fuelled when, in July 2000, The Times printed leaked documents between the Prime Minister and his pollster, Philip Gould. In the first extract, a memo of 29 April, Blair requested that he be ‘personally associated’ with ‘eye-catching’ initiatives to refute claims that the Government was soft on law and order and family issues. Naturally, this was given front-page treatment, the article by Andrew Pierce and Philip Webster stating that ‘it conveys the impression of a worried, interventionist Prime Minister, completely consumed by the importance of improving the Government’s message, and of his own image’. The day after its publication, another leaked memo was received in which Gould was quoted highlighting the extent to which ‘the New Labour brand has been badly contaminated. It is the object of constant criticism, and even worse, ridicule.’ This document was also sent to the the Sun. A third leak of Prime Ministerial correspondence was published on 27 July with a memo from Blair arguing that, having taken the political decision to join the euro, it was time to make the economic argument more forcefully if a referendum was to be won on the issue.[82] These were embarrassing disclosures that provided ammunition for Blair’s opponents, within and without the Labour Party.

The contradiction at the heart of the Government’s legal and constitutional reforms was that power was being transferred with one hand but clawed back by another hand. Authority was being devolved, creating new checks on Downing Street. But the latter used its control of patronage to attempt to ensure loyalty from those it was entrusting with these new powers. The hereditary peers (save for a rump temporarily reprieved) were removed from the House of Lords, but there was noticeably less haste in reforming the upper chamber to strengthen its powers. In the meantime, the number of Labour life peerages was swelled by a huge expansion in appointments of those the Government considered its supporters. Having introduced devolution to Wales, Blair responded to the disgrace of Ron Davies, the First Minister, by enforcing the appointment of one of his own loyalists, Alun Michael, despite the Welsh Labour Party’s obvious preference for the more independently minded Rhodri Morgan. In a similar vein, Frank Dobson was cajoled into becoming Labour’s candidate in the elections for London’s new mayor, despite the support for the maverick Ken Livingstone among the party’s activists. Accusations of media manipulation – or ‘spin’ – and ‘control freakery’ abounded and the Government found itself defending these aspects of its record almost as much as the policies of its legislative programme. On The Times’s comment pages, an inflammatory article entitled ‘Third Way, or Reich?’ by the academic Max Beloff attempted to draw parallels between the methods in which Hitler and Blair removed the obstacles to their absolute power through blandishments towards Establishment dupes in order to remove the constitutional checks and balances. ‘Once in power, Hitler showed little interest in the details of policy – not for him files or Cabinet meetings, let alone parliamentary-style debate,’ Beloff declaimed. ‘A small body of acolytes acted as a buffer between Hitler and the world just as the Downing Street staff now protects Mr Blair’.[83] This was an extreme interpretation and the Prime Minister was soon to discover that his power was not so absolute. In February 2000, Alun Michael stepped down as Welsh First Minister, having lost the confidence of his party who duly turned to Rhodri Morgan. In May, Frank Dobson, Labour’s shoe-in for London major, was humiliated by coming third in the election, behind the Tories’ Steve Norris and the winner, Ken Livingstone, who had stood as an independent and had been expelled from the Labour Party for his temerity. The low turnouts in the Scottish, Welsh and, especially, London elections suggested devolution had yet to interest a largely apathetic electorate.

Voter disenchantment with politics at all its levels was much in evidence as the country moved into an election year. The exact timing and nature of the election campaign was complicated by a serious outbreak of foot and mouth disease in February 2001. Troops were deployed the following month to assist with the containment of the disease amid scenes of massive cattle burning and fresh apprehensions about the state of British farming. Blair’s plans had to be postponed for a month, until, on 8 May, he announced the general election would be held on 7 June.

The chaotic scenes in the countryside apart, few governments could have hoped for more benign conditions with which to go to the polls. Unemployment, the scourge of the Thatcher age, had fallen below one million to its lowest level for twenty-six years. Low interest rates brought the cost of mortgage borrowing to its lowest level for forty years. The property boom, upon which so many households’ long-term financial plans rested, continued unchecked. Whatever the disputes over spin, the possibility of joining the euro or the Government’s legislative programme, these were the material improvements that were extending choice and opportunity to ever more people in their daily lives and aspirations. With the nation’s finances, Gordon Brown exuded a reassuring air (not borne out by the Exchequer’s increasing borrowing figures) of Presbyterian prudence. The opinion polls pointed to another Labour landslide.

From a news perspective, these were not the ingredients for an exciting election campaign. Indeed, there was a common perception that the contest did not begin to engage the public until John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, responded to provocation by punching an aggressive demonstrator. For Matthew Parris, The Times’s principal campaign sketchwriter, it was the Prime Minister who had got off to a deplorable start with the manner in which he launched his bid for re-election. ‘With a Cross behind him, sacred stained glass above him, the upturned faces of 500 schoolgirls in pink and blue gingham before him, and to the strains of a choir singing “I who make the skies of light/I will make the darkness bright/Here I am”, Mr Blair launched his campaign at the St Saviour’s & St Olave’s church school in Southwark’, began Parris’s sketch. Entitled ‘And lo came a demiidol seeking votes’, the sketch was accorded the rare honour of a front-page placing:

… Wild rumours swept the audience that Phoenix the calf was coming on with Blair. Then, to girlish screams normally reserved for adolescent pop idols, Tony Blair strode calfless on to the chapel stage, positioned himself between the Cross and the cameras and beneath the motto ‘Heirs of the past, makers of the future’, flung off his jacket to further screams, and sat down in shirtsleeves, legs apart, arms spread like a sumo-wrestler. A girls’ choir sang ‘We are the children of the future’, which was not the case …

‘A time to love, a time to share,

A time to show how much we care’,

sang the girls. Alastair Campbell clapped caringly.

Of Mr Blair’s speech, the less said the better. We are not used to seeing a Prime Minister, with a Cross behind him, to an audience of children in their own school chapel, attacking the Opposition. ‘What did you think of that?’ my Daily Mail colleague said to a small black girl after the speech. ‘Pack o’ lies,’ said the perceptive child.

… Beside me, and before the closing hymn – yes, hymn – Alastair Campbell sneezed. I tried to say ‘Bless you.’ The words stuck in my throat.[84]

To Parris’s thinking, the first Blair administration, with the attempt at leader idolatry and the media manipulation that the Prime Minister tolerated from his closest servants, had debased the political currency. The result was an electorate disengaged and cynical towards those in public office. There was no sign that the Conservative opposition were any more capable of commanding respect. Hague’s perceived lurch to the right during the week of campaigning and his insistence that voting Tory was the only way to save the pound failed to move the terms of the debate in his direction.

Although The Times had attempted to portray the euro as the great issue at the previous election, there was little prospect of it endorsing Hague’s Conservative Party in 2001. Stothard had, by his own estimation, now been disappointed by a ninth consecutive year of Tory leadership. The liberal conscience of the paper was in the keeping of the chief domestic politics leader writer, Tim Hames, whose light blue empathies had also been bleached by the experience of recent years. He drafted for Stothard The Times’s leading article announcing the paper’s endorsement. It stretched the length of the leader page and was published two days before election day. It was entitled, simply, ‘In Our Time’. Unlike in 1997, there would be no equivocation as to which party to endorse. There was little danger of the country being bounced into joining the euro, it argued, so there was no longer any need to make this the criterion (as Hague sought to do) for casting a vote. Rather, ‘the task for those who toil in politics today is largely that of consolidating the core aspects of Thatcherism and extending them to fresh areas of policy’. Labour had yet to flesh out convincing policies on health, but in only four years it had ensured that ‘the central tenets of the economic settlement of the 1980s – a fierce resistance to inflation, a recognition that taxation at a certain level inflicts more harm than good and a distrust of trade union power’ were better entrenched than they had been four years ago. Making the Bank of England independent had ‘laid down roots of iron’. For all the incomplete thinking, Blair was ‘likely to blend Thatcherite means with social democratic ends in a manner that will benefit public services’. The Times had never ventured to say so before and thus had no precedent to fall back on as it prepared for the inevitable peroration. Thus, it ended by observing that Enoch Powell, William Gladstone, Joseph Chamberlain and Winston Churchill ‘all transferred in or out of the Conservative Party in their time. In our time, in this election, it is Labour which deserves the votes of reformers.’[85]

Four and a half years after Mary Ann Sieghart had stood in the Reform Club and asked her colleagues the question ‘if not now, then when?’ the paper had finally found the strength to say – with some internal dissenters – that the time had indeed come. Even then, the logic was somewhat different: that Blair would complete the Thatcher revolution more convincingly than a fractured and unconvincing Conservative Party. For this analysis, Stothard received a few letters of congratulation and, inevitably, a far heavier postbag from the disgusted and disappointed. Some came in the form of well-argued criticisms of his logic, many stated that they had no wish to subscribe any more to a newspaper that had deserted the Tories, sometimes adding, disingenuously, that the paper had lost its independent voice. One reader, whose letter was published, made clear that he had never voted Conservative in his fifty-three-year life but such was his objection to ‘The Thunderer’ telling him who to vote for that he would vote Tory as a mark of protest. He thought there were many other readers who would do likewise.[86]

Two days later, it transpired there were not. The election day Times carried a MORI poll that pointed to another massive Labour victory, with 45 per cent of the vote, as opposed to 30 per cent for the Tories and 18 per cent for the Liberal Democrats. Health and education were cited as the two most important issues; Europe came tenth equal. ‘Blair heads for second landslide’ ran the non-risky headline.[87] The Times was busy throughout the night as the results came in and the final edition carried an impressive listing of the declarations (the complete results appeared in a twenty-two-page election supplement on Saturday). The vote, when it was finally tallied, showed 42 per cent for Labour, 33 per cent for the Tories and 19 per cent for the Liberal Democrats which, in parliamentary seats, translated into 413, 166 and 52 respectively. Blair had a majority of 167. Four years in which to rebuild after the collapse of 1997 had resulted in the Tories recording a net gain of one seat. Hague immediately accepted his share of responsibility and stepped down. The Peter Brookes cartoon that morning told a different story, one that was more in keeping with the leading column’s line of thinking. The ghostly apparition of a bouffant-haired lady with a handbag was stepping into Number Ten. The caption read simply ‘Back Again’.[88]

Blair returned to work with a mandate marred only by a turnout that, at below 60 per cent, was the lowest since 1918. Re-engaging the public to the purposes of politics would be one of his greatest tasks. After nine years in which The Times had been largely at odds with the government of the day, it had reverted to type and become, once again, the paper most clearly identified with the ruling Establishment. Nonetheless, the roots of the attachment were shallow. The paper appeared to be endorsing Blair personally and the small coterie upon whom he relied. Empathy for the rest of his party was less clearly apparent. There could be no clearer sign of how presidential British politics had become. For their part, the Conservatives remained fractious and ineffective. With Hague stepping down, Portillo, the modernizers’ hope, did not even make the final ballot. Instead, Ken Clarke made a last stand to move his party back towards the pro-European tenets to which Sir Edward Heath had once committed it. On 13 September 2001, he was comprehensively defeated by Iain Duncan Smith, an MP with no Cabinet experience who nonetheless had the benefit, in the party member’s opinion, of opposing the euro. His victory was not the main news event that day. Like all politics around the world in the months and years that followed, it was overshadowed by terrible events that had taken place in Washington DC and New York two days previously, on 11 September 2001.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

WAR IN PEACETIME

The Peace Process in the Middle East and Ireland;

Intervention or Isolation?: Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Chechnya;

the New World Order Versus the Rise of Fundamentalism; 9/11;

the War on Terror; Stothard Steps Down

I

‘Hallelujah! We study war no more because war is no more,’ the President of Harvard University declared, when the appointment of a professor of security studies was vetoed.[1] It was a precipitous hope, as the world looked forward to embarking upon the last decade of the twentieth century, that the Cold War’s end made such scholarship redundant. In July 1990, NATO’s London Declaration announced the conflict was over and four months later, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe[*] convened in Paris and agreed a non-aggression treaty between its thirty-four national signatories together with a commitment to cut conventional forces in Europe by nearly a third – the most detailed arms control agreement ever negotiated.

What was true was that the thaw between the East and the West prompted much talk of new, and generally more hopeful, paradigms in international affairs. Francis Fukuyama argued that the age of ideological conflict was receding and a new post-historical world emerging where liberal democracies would speak peace unto liberal democracies and problems and crises would be subject to technical and managerial tinkering rather than the assertion of clashing dogmas. Extrapolating recent events certainly pointed in this direction. The shift towards democratic forms of government was not confined to Eastern Europe’s seismic convulsion in 1989 and 1990. Around the globe, more than thirty countries had swapped authoritarianism for democracy in the twenty years up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The crumbling of the ideological divide aroused expectations that the Security Council of the United Nations could be freed from the prospect of one or more of its permanent members instinctively vetoing affirmative action. More than forty years after it had emerged from the rubble of the Second World War as the forum for a new international comity, the UN, at last, had an opportunity to become the agent of world peacemaking. The sanction it gave in 1990 to the liberation of Kuwait would have been unthinkable during the previous decade. What was more, the success of the operation with so little loss of life to the US-led coalition forces – in marked contrast to what the doomsayers had prophesied – encouraged those who believed that peacemaking could be an attainable and relatively cheap forward policy if the world’s great nations were persuaded to cooperate rather than actively hinder it. President George Bush spoke optimistically of a ‘new world order’ while his Secretary of State, James Baker, announced ‘our new mission to be the promotion and consolidation of democracy’.[2]

South Africa offered hope. After more than four decades of especially repressive white minority rule, apartheid was dismantled with as little state-sanctioned bloodshed as had accompanied the withering of European Communism. Commentators who anticipated an immediate and vicious backlash from the incoming African National Congress were confounded by the dignified tone of Nelson Mandela. Inaugurated President on 10 May 1994, Mandela promised that his beautiful country would never again become ‘the skunk of the world’. Despite spending twenty-seven years in detention, he recognized that the republic’s many problems would not be solved by the expulsion or degradation of its white and business-orientated community. As The Times’s Southern Africa correspondent, Michael Hamlyn, noted, Mandela felt unable even to acknowledge his wife, Winnie, sitting next to him on the rostrum at the inauguration ceremony to which he had, nonetheless, sent a VIP ticket to James Gregory, his white former jailer on Robben Island.[3] The scars of South Africa could not be healed by the sentiments of redemption alone but, whatever its shortcomings, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission made a better job of burying enmities without developing historical amnesia than many other countries were able to achieve in the years following the toppling of old regimes.

Nowhere was the search for peace more urgent that in the Middle East. The Intifada had begun in late 1987 in the Gaza Strip and spread throughout the Occupied Territories. Between 1987 and 1994, 192 Israelis had been killed by Palestinians, 822 had died in inter-Arab attacks and 1306 Palestinians had been killed by Israelis.[4] One of the effects of exiling Yasser Arafat in Tunis was that the PLO leadership was sidelined by the new generation of Islamic fundamentalists in Hamas and Islamic Jihad who were determined to pursue their holy war against the Jews with even more senseless ferocity than the PLO. The chances of securing any meetings of minds between Israelis and those determined to wipe their nation from the face of the earth were all but unimaginable. Arafat’s relationship with other Arab powers had also been damaged by his decision to back Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait. Yet, at the moment when the PLO leadership appeared at its weakest, the United States began to press Israel to view these old adversaries as a potential force for moderation. This was how the latter now appeared, at any rate in comparison to the fanatics of Hamas (in 1989 Arafat had announced that the 1964 PLO Charter’s denial of Israel’s right to exist was ‘null and void’). A sign of this new approach was evident when Palestinian negotiators with links to the PLO were allowed to participate in the 1991 Madrid peace talks. The breakthrough came in September 1993 when, after rounds of secret negotiations in Oslo, the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and Arafat agreed the White House accord, shaking hands under the gaze of President Clinton. It was, in the literal sense of the term, a peace process. Limited Palestinian autonomy would be created in the Gaza Strip and around Jericho in the West Bank under an elected Palestinian council. A timetable was established to finalize the status of East Jerusalem and even to settle the relationship between Israel and what, it seemed, would emerge as a Palestinian state. ‘The handshake was neither warm nor lingering,’ The Times’s leading article admitted, yet, ‘Peace, the oldest message from the Middle East, the eternal hope behind so many wars that have wracked the region, came a step closer.’[5] The following year the PLO was handed authority for Jericho and Palestinian police assumed security over the area.

The 1994 Nobel Peace Prize was shared between Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and the Israeli Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres. Israel and Jordan formally ended their forty-six-year state of war. Yet, while many Israelis believed that it took a strong man with a fearsome reputation like Rabin – the former general who had led Israel’s lightning 1967 conquest of the occupied territories – to guarantee a plausible order for peace to take root, a few believed he was selling out on all they held dear. Despite the efforts of a Jewish fundamentalist to derail the peace process by massacring Muslims at prayer in Hebron, in September 1995 Rabin and Arafat made further progress, agreeing on West Bank self-determination from which Israeli troops would be withdrawn. By the end of the year, Nablus and Bethlehem were to be among the towns under Palestinian control. By then, Rabin was no more, gunned down in November at a Tel Aviv peace rally by a Jewish extremist. Shimon Peres succeeded as Prime Minister and, in February the following year, Yasser Arafat became President of the Palestinian Authority. Despite this, Rabin’s assassination had created a new climate of uncertainty and vulnerability. Islamic suicide bombings undermined both the Israeli government’s ability to safeguard its citizens and the belief that the Palestinian Authority was anything other than a front behind which terrorists could operate at will. Israelis responded in 1996 by voting in a new Likud administration under Benjamin Netanyahu that was committed to maintaining the policy of Jewish settlements on the West Bank. For its part, the Palestinian Authority proved to be a byword for corruption.

Netanyahu’s government lost power in 1999. A further attempt to find agreement was made between his successor, the Labour Party’s Ehud Barak, and Arafat at Camp David in 2000. Israel appeared prepared to make concessions that would cede the vast majority of the West Bank to Palestinian control but not to lose access to the holy sites in East Jerusalem and to trade some Israeli land for keeping some West Bank settlements. This proved to be a sticking point for Arafat who not only demanded his share of the ancient city but, allegedly, also raised the right of the Palestinian refugees (and their descendants) of 1948 to return to their former homes and properties in Israel. The talks collapsed. The Times, at any rate, believed it knew where to apportion blame. ‘Mr Arafat has passed up a Palestinian state that would include 90 per cent of his goals, plus the certainty of economic support,’ bemoaned the leading article, written by Rosemary Righter:

Instead, he has gone home insisting that he will unilaterally declare a Palestinian state, on September 13, that will cover only a morcellized 40 per cent. Basking in the praise of Arabs who have never seen a defeat they did not call victory, Mr Arafat may not yet see what he has lost – both in American goodwill, and on the ground. But his negotiators do see it. They left Camp David insisting that the talks will go on and that they saw in the outcome ‘seeds that will grow very fast’. They know that, nurtured by revived Palestinian militancy, the seeds of war could sprout fast too. Mr Barak’s position is difficult; Mr Arafat’s is perilous. Before September 13, this Houdini of the Middle East must measure the depth of the abyss.[6]

It was not quite the end. Talks in Taba, in January 2001, proved to be Arafat’s last chance to negotiate a settlement. In the event, he failed, once again, to grasp the opportunity. The Israeli people responded by voting out Barak. In his place they turned to a Likud administration under the hard-line Ariel Sharon, whose failure to prevent the Sabra and Chatila massacres of 1982 continued to hinder his claims to statesmanship. Arafat was once again seen as part of the problem rather than key to a solution. He found himself hemmed in and under effective Israeli house arrest in Ramallah on the West Bank. President Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, endorsed a new ‘road map’ for peace that envisaged a Palestinian state in the West Bank with a democratic leader (though not Arafat) if the bloody attacks on Israel stopped. Plans were one matter, delivery quite another. Arafat’s health deteriorated and it became clear that it would take a new Palestinian leader to establish any basis of trust with his Israeli interlocutors. Hope remained. But it was yet to triumph over experience.

Closer to home, a different peace process also struggled to bring harmony where there had been discord. The 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement failed to assuage the arguments of the gunmen. Atrocities continued to stain the late 1980s in Ulster. In 1988, the IRA marked Remembrance Day in Enniskillen by detonating a bomb there, killing eleven and injuring sixty-one as they gathered around the memorial to the fallen of two world wars. In March the following year, two British corporals who found themselves confronted by mourners at an IRA funeral were beaten to death on the street. Having narrowly failed to blow up Margaret Thatcher in the Brighton Grand Hotel in 1984, the IRA’s first attempt to murder John Major had come within two months of his becoming Prime Minister. On 7 February 1991, an IRA van sped up Whitehall and fired two mortar bombs at 10 Downing Street while Major was with his War Cabinet (it was the middle of the Gulf War). One bomb landed in the 10 Downing Street garden, smashing windows. Two others landed close by without exploding. Subsequent outrages were even less discriminate: a bomb in central Manchester in December 1992 wounded sixty-four while fifty were injured and two children killed by a bomb placed in Warrington’s town centre in March 1993. The following month, the IRA struck the City of London, inflicting £1 billion worth of damage and forcing the introduction of a ‘ring of steel’ to protect one of the world’s greatest financial centres.

It was against this background that the search for a negotiated solution recommenced. In November 1993, it was revealed that the British Government had held secret talks with the IRA. A further effort at rapprochement with Dublin was also attempted. In May 1993, the Queen met Mary Robinson in London. It was the first meeting between the British and Irish heads of state since 1937. In December, Major and the Irish Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, agreed the ‘Downing Street’ peace accord. Sinn Fein were offered the chance to join the peace process if their terrorist accomplices ended the armed struggle. This appeal was met, if not quite in the desired form of words, in August 1994 when the IRA declared a ‘complete cessation of military operations’ – after a quarter-century of Troubles that had claimed three thousand victims. Loyalist terror groups followed suit in October. In January 1995, British troops ended daytime patrolling of Belfast’s streets. On the last day of January, the Prime Minister’s office fielded a telephone call from Stuart Higgins, the editor of the Sun. He asked, speculatively, if Major was planning to meet the Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams. When asked why he should imagine this, Higgins replied that he was guessing that there must be some big story brewing because the Wapping print hall appeared to be preparing an unusually large print run of The Times’s Irish edition. The Sun’s editor did not know what The Times was up to, but thought Downing Street might be able to tell him. Clearly, something was afoot and when Downing Street discovered The Times had gained access to a draft of the framework document drawn up by the British and Irish governments for Ulster’s constitutional future, feverish attempts were made to prevent publication. During the evening, Christopher Meyer, Major’s press secretary, made several telephone calls to Stothard begging him not to publish the details before the final terms were officially released, arguing that doing so imperilled the peace process. Unmoved, The Times went ahead with its scoop, although the Government’s statement was added to the later editions. The front page report was written by Matthew D’Ancona, a Roman Catholic with Unionist sympathies, who stated that the draft terms brought ‘the prospect of a united Ireland closer than it has been at any time since partition in 1920.’ Given that the draft included proposals for strong north-south executive bodies it was a fair comment. With Unionists duly alarmed and John Hume, the SDLP leader calling for everyone to ‘shut up’, Major went so far as to deliver a television address to reassure the people of the province. The Prime Minister had every cause to be alarmed and not just for the peace of Ulster. His dwindling parliamentary majority at Westminster had forced him to be reliant on the goodwill of Ulster Unionist MPs. In his autobiography, Major accused the scholarly D’Ancona of being ‘an ambitious young journalist’ and his disclosure evidence of ‘malign behaviour.’ It certainly gave Unionist politicians the opportunity to make clear to Major that the sort of terms revealed in The Times would be unacceptable as a basis for a settlement.[7]

The final draft of the framework document was published on 22 February. It proposed an Ulster legislative assembly and a revocation of the Republic’s constitutional claim on the province. The cross-border aspects that had caused such fury in the leaked draft remained, although in a more carefully circumscribed form. While accepting that much remained vague and uncertain, The Times gave qualified support to the process.

However vague remained the details, The Times supported the concept. The IRA was less trusting. Despite the acceptance of the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble, that the decommissioning of IRA weapons was not a precondition of the talks, Republicans remained suspicious that a new assembly would be another means of turning back the clock to a province under permanent Stormont Unionist majority rule. In February 1996, they returned to violence, killing two in a blast in London’s Docklands and injuring two hundred in Manchester. Coded warnings paralysed railway stations and motorways during the 1997 general election campaign and it was not until Tony Blair had been elected that a new ceasefire was declared. Sinn Fein was duly rewarded with a seat at the peace talks. In 1998, the party joined a new power-sharing assembly at Stormont. In return for supposedly removing the armalite from their ballot-box strategy, convicted terrorists (both Republican and loyalist) were conditionally released from prison. The following year, Chris Patten issued a report that wound up the RUC, replacing it with a new police service whose structure was supposed to reassure nationalist apprehensions.

There were those who wanted some clarity on what Ulster’s new state of constructive ambiguity actually involved. Despite the Patten Report, Sinn Fein continued its policy of non-compliance with the new police service and the scale of the IRA’s decommissioning, although secret, was clearly symbolic rather than substantive. A splinter group, the ‘Real IRA’ killed twenty-eight and injured 220 by detonating a bomb in Omagh, Co. Tyrone. Unease continued in the Unionist community. David Trimble had been elected First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly but had to find a means of reaching out to unionism’s disaffected voices. Attempts to curtail the Orange Order marching season had already become a flashpoint, particularly, at Drumcree. Furthermore, devolving authority to a power-sharing executive in which the main parties were all guaranteed key portfolios appeared to encourage voters to register their apprehensions by endorsing the more extreme parties. Thus, the nationalist SDLP haemorrhaged votes to Sinn Fein while Trimble’s pro-agreement but deeply divided Ulster Unionists lost ground to the fundamentalists in the Revd Ian Paisley’s DUP. A process intended to make the politicians behave in a more consensual way actually encouraged the electorate to vote increasingly for the hardliners. The IRA’s continual dalliance with illegal activity led to Stormont’s temporary suspension.

The experience of post-apartheid South Africa was uppermost in the minds of those trying to drive the peace process forward and there was no shortage of precedents for terrorists being brought into mainstream politics. The fall in the number of fatal shootings (although punishment beatings and kneecapping continued unabated) raised expectations that more normal living conditions in Ulster would breed more normal politics. The first leading article after the 1998 Agreement saluted the deal, but the piece’s author, Michael Gove, was deeply uneasy about the terms and became more alarmed once the details emerged. He almost succeeded in persuading Stothard to oppose the Agreement.[8] When nationalist objections had curtailed the marching season two years before, Orange Order Unionists were pitted against the security forces in ugly scenes at Drumcree. Stothard had sent Gove over there to cover the event at a time when most of the media were reporting it in a light highly unsympathetic to the Unionist cause. Gove empathized with Unionist fears, ‘the sense that Ulster is a province under siege has been a persistent feature of life in Northern Ireland’, he wrote. He quoted sympathetically the opinion of the Drumcree marchers which summed up their attitude succinctly: ‘“Only a couple of years ago Sinn Fein were murdering innocent people; now they’re treated like film starts and lords of the manor. It proves violence works. Of course we’re angry.”‘[9] In the succeeding years, while the peace process switched repeatedly between gears and indeed was repeatedly flung into reverse, Gove continued to provide commentary that balanced sympathy for David Trimble’s predicament with doubts about the price paid for appeasing Sinn Fein-IRA. Gove was perplexed by the double standards of commentators who called for life prison sentences for child molesters but supported the British Government’s release of ‘some of the UK’s most morally culpable mass murderers after sentences which would be considered lenient for robbers’. ‘The price of the “peace” negotiated on Good Friday in 1998 has been the freeing of hundreds of Barabbases to satisfy the mobs which call themselves paramilitary organisations,’ Gove maintained. ‘How can the rule of law maintain respect if it is applied arbitrarily?’ Furthermore, he believed there was ‘a clear moral difference’ between the democratic emancipation of Nelson Mandela’s ANC and the embrace offered to both Republican and Unionist gunmen whose role had been to disrupt the workings of a democracy. ‘The fate of terrorists, we are told, is to end up dancing with duchesses at Lancaster House,’ he began his peroration. Yet, in this instance, ‘ministers are not executing another skilful diplomatic pas de deux’ but ‘dancing on the graves of children’.[10]

II

There was no shortage of symbolism when the thirty-four countries of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe met to bury the Cold War hatchet in Paris in November 1990. History was punctuated by peace treaties signed in Paris and the most famous – or notorious – had been agreed at Versailles. ‘Can permanent peace in Europe at last be celebrated today?’ asked the leading article in The Times commemorating the latest endeavour to settle the Continent:

Unfortunately not. In burying the Yalta status quo, the popular revolutions in central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself have unleashed local, national and regional tensions, fed by ethnic rivalries, disputed borders and the fragility of renascent democratic processes. These instabilities, though preferable to Yalta’s sleep of the living dead, make the celebration of continental peace premature.[11]

At the time Rosemary Righter composed these lines, the three Baltic States had unilaterally declared their independence, but the Soviet Union was still in existence. It would survive, at least officially, for another year of troubles during which Gorbachev was briefly toppled in a coup by hardliners only to be reinstated by the man who delivered him and humiliated him within the space of hours, Boris Yeltsin. A Russian, as opposed to Soviet, identity would now elbow itself to the fore. On 2 December 1991, Ukraine voted for independence, destroying Gorbachev’s hopes of a new, looser confederation surviving. Two days before Christmas, and within days of the superpower’s seventieth year, the headline on The Times’s front page proclaimed simply, ‘The Soviet Union is no more’. It fell to the paper’s Moscow correspondent, Mary Dejevsky, to pronounce its end: ‘The world’s second superpower and communist prototype ceased to exist at the weekend by common consent of its unhappy constituents’, her front-page lead began. A temporary fig leaf was created in its stead, a Commonwealth of Independent States, but its ‘only one central structure agreed so far is the strategic nuclear command – a fitting legacy for a regime built on military power’.[12] On Christmas Day, Gorbachev stood down, handing over his control of nuclear weapons to Russia. In a leading article entitled simply, in the manner of an obituary, ‘Mikhail Gorbachev’, The Times paid tribute to him, recalling the words of the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu: ‘When the best leader’s work is done, the people say, “we did it ourselves!”’[13]

In the autumn of the following year, Dejevsky reflected, ‘somewhere between the winter of 1989 and the summer of 1991, the mass fear which held the Soviet Union in thrall dissolved’. The menace of the KGB lost its hypnotic effect to dictate thoughts and actions. ‘For the onlooker it was like watching one of those accelerated films of a plant’s life, but on a grander scale: the fall of an empire in four months and four days, as the ascendant Russia stripped the authority, then the power and finally the dignity, from the unsustainable Union and its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.’[14] By then, another multi-ethnic socialist federation was being rent asunder, in the Balkans.

Between 1991 and 1995, Europe experienced its bloodiest conflict since the end of the Second World War. Yugoslavia was a federation of six republics, three religions and two alphabets that, with Josip Tito’s death in 1980, had no leader who inspired the requisite awe and confidence to keep it together. A (frequently amended) constitution, a Communist doctrine and opposition to becoming a Soviet satellite proved, by the end of the decade, unequal to the appeals of nationalism and disillusion with economic underperformance. This was all too evident when, in 1990, multiparty elections came to the constituent republics. Croatia turned to the nationalist, Franjo Tudjman. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the winner was Alija Izetbegovic’s Muslim Party of Democratic Action (SDA). Both Tudjman and Izetbegovic had previously been imprisoned by the Yugoslav authorities, Tudjman for questioning the scale of pro-Nazi war crimes committed by the Croats and Izetbegovic for his Islamic proselytizing. Serbia, too, voted to move away from pieties of multi-ethnic sentiment. Its new President, Slobodan Milosevic, frightened the other members of the Yugoslav federation with his increasingly nationalistic and bellicose rhetoric, although in this he was, if anything, surpassed by the leading opposition party in Belgrade.

Confronted by these assertions of national and religious identity, the federal authorities withered. In July 1990, the Slovene assembly declared independence, a verdict endorsed by 94.6 per cent in a subsequent referendum on the proviso that a looser arrangement could not be agreed instead. The one federal institution that did have the will to assert itself, the army (the JNA), prepared to intimidate this Slovene Spring into submission. In Belgrade, however, Milosevic was content to let Slovenia secede. Apart from any other consideration, Slovenia’s departure would enhance Serbian predominance in the remaining federation. Meanwhile, the Serb minority were encouraged to create their own enclave in Croatia so that if that republic also seceded the borders of greater Serbia would be stretched further. The ethnic Serbs boycotted a Croat referendum that returned a massive majority in favour of independence. Croatia followed Slovenia’s declaration of independence. Pulled out of Slovenia, the JNA clashed with the lightly armed but tenacious Croatian National Guard and bombarded Dubrovnik and Vukovar. An armistice was agreed on 2 January 1992. By then, Germany had unilaterally recognized Slovenia and Croatia. The promptitude of Helmut Kohl’s government was surprising. Although Germany had recently advocated moves towards a common European foreign and security policy during the Maastricht negotiations, it was quick to act independently when pressured by Croatia’s Catholic co-religionists in Germany. Kohl’s European partners, with varying degrees of reluctance, followed suit. The same process took place in Bosnia, its ethnic Serb minority boycotting the republic’s referendum – which went overwhelmingly in favour of independence – in March 1992. The EU duly recognized Bosnia. In May, Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were all admitted to the UN.

The Balkans were the tectonic plates where Catholic, Muslim, Orthodox, European, Slav, Ottoman and Asian rivalries rubbed against one another. During the 1990s they were also the battleground for conflicting notions of realpolitik and international justice. The multi-ethnic Bosnia was a microcosm of the varying struggles of identity, power and interdependence reflected in the so-called ‘international community’. In response, the latter had to grapple with whether to impose a solution of its own devising or whether to let nature – in its Darwinist form of war – take its course. The former could only be achieved by the threat, or use, of significant force. An alternative was to try to find ways of ameliorating the worst of the fighting that was taking place until such time as saner voices could prevail over the combatants. As early as September 1991, the UN had imposed an arms embargo on all Yugoslav republics. Sanctions against Serbia were imposed in May 1992 and made more severe the following April. Closely prescribed in its activities (which were entirely defensive), a UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) had been deployed in Croatia in early 1992 and Bosnia during the summer of 1992. The Bosnian Muslim argument for keeping the country as a single entity had an attraction to an outside community keen to set a precedent. Permitting Bosnia’s disintegration threatened the redrawing along ethnic lines of many of the other Balkan states too – Serbian Kosovo and bits of Macedonia might fight to join Albania; part of Serbia could go to Hungary. UNPROFOR had no mandate to use its own arms to ensure Bosnia was kept together but this was the principle behind the UN and EU co-sponsored Vance-Owen peace plan of January 1993. It proposed dividing Bosnia into ten semi-autonomous provinces within a new Bosnian state with weak powers. In its leading column, The Times endorsed the plan and suggested that if any of the warring parties rejected it, the UN should authorize its enforcement by ‘all available means’.[15] In the event, the Vance-Owen proposals were acceptable to the Croats (who stood to make gains from it) and the Muslims but were resoundingly rejected by a referendum by the Bosnian Serbs.

Rebuffed, Lord Owen conceded sadly that his plan had no future. Bosnia appeared to have not much of one either. The Bosnian Serbs had been besieging Sarajevo since April 1992 and had forged together their enclaves into Republika Srpska, displacing where necessary Muslims and Croats to do so. Meanwhile, the Muslims and the Croats formed their own separate Bosnian states. These three entities fought against one another, although they sometimes allied as a matter of convenience with one to better attack the other. Money and expediency as well as hate and grand strategy dictated military tactics. Serb and Croat successes appeared to doom any prospect of a single republic remaining when the dust settled. Suffering most from the UN-imposed arms blockade, the Muslims’ position became the most precarious. Unwilling to engage their pursuers directly, the UN preferred to enhance UNPROFOR’s role, creating ‘safe havens’ in Sarajevo, Gorazde, Srebrenica, Tuzla, Zepa and Bihac. It also empowered Nato with ensuring a ‘no-fly zone’ to military aircraft and using its own air power to defend, if necessary, the safe havens. There were strong voices raised against allowing ‘mission creep’. Led by the United States and the EU, the international community was reluctant to enter a bloody war in pursuit of an uncertain settlement that involved fighting one or more enemies who had a far better native grasp of the defensive possibilities of the terrain. Russia retained sympathy for the Serbs and watched even such ineffectual NATO military preparations as did take place with great suspicion. The memory of the gunshot in Sarajevo in 1914 that ricocheted into the First World War was the most powerful break on the various great powers plunging headlong into a fresh Balkan conflict.

On 16 April 1993, Srebrenica fall to Bosnian Serb forces. As the first reports of the city’s fall appeared in The Times, Simon Jenkins delivered in his column a resounding rejection of the view articulated three days earlier by Margaret Thatcher that Britain and the UN were in danger of becoming ‘accomplices to a massacre’ unless they broke their arms embargo in order to provide the Muslims with the means to defend themselves. Jenkins thought this idea was profoundly mistaken. Arming the Muslims would merely provoke the Russians into shipping more arms to the Bosnian Serbs. Nor should the West intervene directly. On their own, NATO air strikes would not work and nor was sending in ground troops a good idea. Citing the failure of the 1982–4 peacekeeping mission to the Lebanon, Jenkins believed ground troops would only ensure NATO ended up becoming associated with anti-Serb atrocities prior to an inevitable and humiliating withdrawal. ‘Wars end when one side is beaten,’ he assured his readers. ‘The Muslims are not going to win this ghastly war. It is irresponsible for the outside world to help to prolong it, however grotesque the Serbs’ behaviour.’[16] Politicians also had to consider what implications military intervention might have in boosting the Russian nationalist resurgence against Yeltsin, a point made in a letter The Times published from Professor Geoffrey Lee Williams that, ‘Crudely put, does Boris Yeltsin matter more to the West than the fate of a phantom state? Greater Serbia is now a fact. To put the vanquished Muslims before the wider interests of the West would be foolish in the extreme.’[17]

Filing for The Times from within the besieged city of Sarajevo, Richard Beeston tried to report events with a similar level of detachment while privately horrified at what the ‘international community’ was failing to prevent. ‘All of us grew up in the Cold War era believing that there were rules governing how international politics was run and intervening in internal conflicts really was not on the table,’ he later recalled. Having reported from Beirut and Baghdad, Beeston was not squeamish, yet even he conceded that, ‘Bosnia was the first time I saw horrific events being perpetrated on our doorstep.’ For him, this did make matters worse and led him to question the old assumptions. ‘I used to get the flight in from Rome and within twenty minutes you would be in medieval Europe with women being raped and having their heads cut off and we were sitting by and Douglas Hurd was talking about “a level playing field.” It was just shocking and it made a huge impact to see these atrocities taking place. I hope it did not show in my writing.’

Journalists took it in turns to cover the Bosnian war from the front line. Beeston’s initial impressions were shaped by the experience of his first trip into Sarajevo. Geography rendered it acutely vulnerable. The city was in the bottom of a valley with high mountains around it from where the Bosnian Serb forces entrenched their artillery. Beeston decided to break into the besieged city by travelling with the aid convoys bringing in flour to keep its bakeries going. The closer the trucks got, the more the shots rained down upon them. Tyres were blown, forcing the convoy to stop. Risking all to the cross-wires of a sniper, drivers leapt out to change the tyres before making it safely into Sarajevo. On his arrival, Beeston discovered a city that resembled ‘a scene from Hieronymus Bosch of old men cutting bits of wood from the trees in the park to warm their houses, snow everywhere, girls prostituting themselves to Ukrainian peacekeepers to get petrol or a couple of cans of tomatoes’. ‘When you see a culture that is so close to yours and people of similar values, it’s extraordinary to witness this sort of savagery,’ Beeston later confessed. ‘It makes you think anything is possible. You really stare into the dark pit.’ He proceeded on to the Holiday Inn where many of the world’s reporters had set up operations. The top floors had been destroyed by shellfire but the bottom lounge area still functioned as a hacks’ doss house. ‘They were a fairly colourful collection of journalists,’ he admitted.[18]

While the Holiday Inn crowd traded war stories and scuttled back and forth along ‘sniper’s ally’, two other Times journalists, Tom Rhodes and Bill Frost, were filing reports from their perambulations in and around Vitez, where an UNPROFOR detachment of British troops was based. In the spring of 1993 they met Anthony Loyd, an itinerant freelancer who was trying to purge his personal demons by throwing himself into the thick of the action. They encouraged him to file some copy for The Times. So began the career of one of the most intrepid war correspondents in the paper’s history.

Although it was not obvious from the long hair that gave him the look of a hippy, Anthony Loyd came from a multinational military family. Dropping out of Eton at the age of fifteen (he had hated the place and had been caught with drugs) and with little in the way of academic qualifications, he had spent five years as an officer in the Royal Green Jackets. He had seen service – although not as much of it as he believed he would have liked – in the Gulf War. Indeed, it had proved an anticlimactic end to his Army career and he had difficulty adapting to civilian life. He was treated for severe depression. The war in Yugoslavia, he later admitted, offered ‘either a metamorphosis or an exit. I wanted to reach a human extreme in order to cleanse myself of fear, and saw war as the ultimate frontier of human existence.’[19] Taking a photojournalism course ‘as his passport to war’, he arrived there and immediately got as close to the action as he could. He kept a lucky charm in one of his pockets – a First World War bullet that had been pulled out of his great grandfather, the one-eyed, one-handed Adrian Carton De Wiart VC. Loyd had been taught Serbo-Croat before he arrived. He also considered that his Army training was an advantage he had over those journalists who were unfamiliar with the risks of the front line since it gave him ‘a much better understanding of war and how to deal with men pointing guns at you’.[20]

Loyd’s only journalistic training was as a photographer. His dispatches were eyewitness depictions of what he saw and experienced rather than dispassionate analyses of grand political strategy. The latter task could be crafted as competently from the information technology environment of Wapping as from the vantage point of a shallow trench ducking incoming ordnance. The potential drawback with Loyd’s desire to risk all with the combatants was that of the journalist getting too close to the story, losing a sense of objectivity in consequence. Like many outsiders, he felt the nationalistic tensions had been whipped up by culpable Serb and Croat politicians disinterring the historic language of ‘Cetnik,’ ‘Ustaša’ and ‘Turk’ for their own ends. The Muslims alone appeared to be committed to a less overtly sectarian compromise. It was they who were subjected to the worst violence.[21] There were moments, indeed, when Loyd too showed signs of wanting to become a combatant once more. Yet, unlike the more dispassionate reporting of those removed from the fray, there was no better means of bringing the war’s realities home to Times readers and, indeed, a wider polity beyond. In one particularly memorable dispatch, he described how the Croats had captured three Bosnian Muslim soldiers, strapped anti-tank mines to their chests, roped up their hands and sent them back across no-man’s land towards their own lines. Ominously, a wire attached to their torsos unravelled a little more with each gingerly taken step back towards their comrades. Realizing what was about to happen, the Muslim officer defending the trench ordered his men to open fire on them. His men refused to shoot their comrades. Moments later, the human bombs detonated. A month passed before their remains could be retrieved – by members of the Coldstream Guards. The Croat deputy commander from the brigade responsible rationalized the crime to Loyd: ‘It’s a dirty war. Insanity becomes normality here.’[22]

Loyd was intoxicated and horrified by the mindless depravity he encountered and admitted to taking heroin as a means of escape. He was not the only one to find the tasks of depicting the conflict a bruising personal challenge. The Times and the Imperial War Museum cooperated to sponsor the Scottish-based painter, Peter Howson, as the official British war artist. Howson, who specialized in strong figurative images of the Glaswegian working and under classes in all their physical power and abject hopelessness, travelled to Bosnia in June 1993. He found the atmosphere so tense that, even with sketchpad in hand, he sometimes feared to stare at anyone and was so unnerved by what he did glimpse that he became ill and returned home early. However, he summoned up the courage to return for a second trip in December. The result was a series of powerful depictions and searing images. One large canvas, Croatian and Muslim, featured the brutal rape of a woman whose head had been thrust down a lavatory bowl. It was considered too graphic for reproduction in The Times or even to be retained by the Imperial War Museum.

On 5 February 1994, a mortar bomb killed sixty-eight and wounded two hundred in Sarajevo’s market place. Although it remained unclear who had fired it, the Bosnian Serbs were blamed at the time. Responding to the atrocity, NATO finally decided to break the siege by air power and ordered the Bosnian Serbs to pull back their artillery or face strikes. When they refused, it was Boris Yeltsin who persuaded them to withdraw in return for the deployment of Russian peacekeeping forces in the area. Yeltsin had saved NATO from military action that could have escalated beyond the level of commitment the politicians envisaged and, into the bargain, he managed to elbow Russia’s way into the conflict zone. The Contact Group was formed, consisting of the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Russia. In particular, the United States put diplomatic pressure on Tudjman and Izetbegovic to agree to a joint Muslim-Croat province. In doing so, this at least gave them a common foe against whom to unite. The Americans also acquiesced in allowing the Muslims to receive arms shipments, in breach of the UN embargo. In July, the Contact Group published proposals to end the Bosnian war by ceding 51 per cent of its land to the Muslim – Croat federation and 49 per cent to a Bosnian Serb state. Yet, despite Slobodan Milosevic’s efforts, the Bosnian Serbs’ assembly voted against surrendering any territory they had already conquered. Thanks to the ferocity of their ‘ethnic cleansing’ they had gained control of 70 per cent of Bosnia and did not see why they should hand any of it back.

This was to prove a costly mistake by the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic. Milosevic cut off all trade other than food and medicine from Serbia to the Republika Srpska and Yeltsin’s desire to wash his hands of such troublesome associates was only tempered by the pro-Serb popular outpourings of his fellow Russians. NATO, meanwhile, resorted to air strikes. While Sarajevo enjoyed a four-month ceasefire at the beginning of 1995, elsewhere the situation deteriorated. In May, Bosnian Serbs captured 350 UN peacekeepers protecting the ‘safe haven’ of Gorazde. Twenty of them became ‘human shields’, chained to potential NATO targets. The UN’s strategy had been ridiculed in the most open and provocative manner. While, on 31 May, President Clinton announced he was prepared to commit some ground troops in Bosnia, it was clear that his reluctance to get wholly engaged meant the numbers involved would be small and their presence temporary. The fear of ‘mission creep’ continued to play on Clinton’s mind, as it did on that of the British Government. Within days, Clinton was rowing back from his apparent commitment. The Times was unimpressed by the lack of a coherent strategy in Washington.[23]

Fleet Street was virtually united in believing something must be done and that something meant supporting armed force to push the Bosnian Serbs back. Continuing to offer an alternative voice in The Times, Simon Jenkins despaired of what he believed was this collective delusion. The UN was, he argued, ‘reduced to sending troops to relieve troops, as Kitchener was sent to rescue Gordon in Khartoum’. Giving the Bosnian Serbs ‘a bloody nose’ – the minimum position upon which most British editorializing appeared to agree – would only inflame matters whereas ‘the sooner we get out, the sooner this wretched war will come to its eventual end’.[24] That the situation was deteriorating was not in doubt. On 11 July, Bosnian Serb forces captured the UN-designated ‘save haven’ of Srebrenica. The four hundred Dutch peacekeepers protecting the enclave ran away when the Bosnian Serbs threatened to execute thirty-two of their captured comrades. Twenty thousand Muslim refugees fled the Bosnian Serb advance. Those who did not made a bad error. The Bosnian Serbs separated Srebrenica’s Muslims, conveying the women and children to Tuzla. The eight thousand men were murdered.

The atrocity, the single worst war crime in post-war European history, demonstrated the abject failure of the UN mission. Even before the news of the mass murders had been received, The Times voiced its support for French calls to retake Srebrenica by force.[25] Reliance on constant referral to the UN had disabled attempts to respond quickly to situations on the ground. Henceforth the UN effectively ceded its military operational authority to NATO. On 23 July 1995, 1200 British troops were dispatched to keep the road open to Sarajevo and the UN’s arms embargo had long since ceased to hold back the supplies reaching the Muslims. On 5 August, the Krajina Serbs came under fierce assault from a Croat offensive (assisted by American advice). Twenty-five thousand Serbs were thrown out of their homes. As the Russians were not slow to point out, the West’s silence or even connivance with the Croats’ ethnic cleansing of the Krajina Serbs was at variance with the active measures finally taken to safeguard the Bosnian Muslims from their Serb neighbours. Bosnian Muslims also attacked in a concerted movement with the Croat offensive and, at last, the Serbs found themselves on the receiving end, and in retreat. NATO spent the first two weeks of September launching air strikes against the Bosnian Serb positions around Sarajevo. Cruise missiles disabled their communications network in western Bosnia. The Serb heavy artillery was finally withdrawn from around Sarajevo. After 1300 days, the siege was lifted.

The Bosnian Muslim soldiers were advancing into formerly Serb-held territory and in the autumn Anthony Loyd joined one of their elite brigades as it set about securing a narrow twelve-mile salient to turn the Serb flank. It proved a stretch too far. The brigade had been fighting for three weeks without relief and was exhausted. It was at this moment that the Serbs counterattacked. When he had joined the Green Jackets, Loyd had found many of his comrades were partly motivated by a desire to find out what killing was like. Now he tried to convey to Times readers sitting comfortably in their homes what it was like almost getting killed. ‘Fear overtakes us like a sudden fever. My heart is about to pump itself out of my chest cavity and my brain is emptying of rational thought. My only urge is to run,’ he wrote. The unit was collapsing around him and under attack on three sides. ‘The air is shrieking with flying metal and whizzing shot.’ Desperately he tried to scramble for cover:

There are 600 yards of open ground to the nearest treeline, and it is being raked with anti-aircraft fire. Speed is our only hope and in our fear we throw down whatever equipment we can. Even a flak jacket is ditched in the grass: 25lb of body armour is little use against the shells exploding round us.

I know the rules of this battlefield: I know what happened to the Croats who surrendered in Vukovar and to the Muslims who gave up in Srebrenica. They are dead, and I do not believe for a moment that a press card will save me from a shallow grave. My fear turns to dread at the thought of the captors’ mutilating knives. I envy the soldiers running beside me for their pistols. One of my three comrades has prepared a grenade in case one of us should be too badly wounded to go on.

The Serbs were at the edge of the hamlet, rounds were cracking out from through the trees. Loyd could not conceive how he was going to evade death:

I think of my mother and sister, of a group of close friends, of people whom I have loved and who have loved me. Some stillness comes to me. It has been a good life and I accept that I am ready to die. But I don’t stop running.

In the trees I am surprised to find myself alive. We gather our breath, sprawling occasionally on the ground as shells whine overhead. Although in cover at last, we are still about ten miles from the Bosnian lines that are holding firm, and the Serbs are closing in. Our thoughts begin to gel. We are together again; four journalists and 14 Bosnian soldiers. What happened to the others, I do not know. Across the plain, artillery is ripping into the ground around the route taken by most of the fleeing group.

Loyd spent the next four hours moving ‘through an empty landscape of deserted hamlets, dead livestock and fallen crucifixes, growing more confident in the silence around us’ before eventually reaching the safety of the Bosnian lines in the darkness.[26]

For the Bosnian Serbs this was a minor victory in a campaign suddenly filled with reverses. With sanctions being lifted from Serbia, Milosevic had decided to pressure the Bosnian Serbs into ending the struggle. What was more, from their perspective the strategic position was deteriorating. The Croat and Muslim offensives drove the Bosnian Serb control of the country back from 70 to 50 per cent. Suddenly, the Contact Group’s 1994 offer of 49 per cent no longer appeared so demeaning. What was more, from Belgrade Milosevic acted to undermine the Bosnian Serbs’ room for manoeuvre by subsuming their position within a negotiating team that he led. He met Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman and the Bosnian Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegovic, for peace talks at Dayton, Ohio, in the first three weeks of November. After days of unrelenting bargaining, an agreement to end the Bosnian war was reached. Bosnia-Herzegovina would become a nominally united entity with central authorities but divided between two autonomous regions, a Bosnian Serb republic and a Muslim – Croat federation that included Sarajevo and Gorazde. A sixty-thousand-strong NATO Implementation Force (IFOR) would keep the peace. ‘The fact that the toughest disputes at Ohio were over territory would seem to spell one word: partition,’ noted The Times’s leading article when the deal was done. While war weariness might help the situation, ‘If Nato merely patrols buffer zones, it will do no more than put this conflict on ice … Bosnia will be stable only when the internal frontiers erected in Ohio cease to matter to Bosnians of all persuasions. However precariously founded this agreement may be it must, after such atrocious suffering, inspire hope. It cannot yet inspire confidence.’[27]

It was unclear how many people had been killed in the wars that dismembered Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995 although the figure of a quarter of a million was the most frequently cited estimate. More than three million people had been uprooted, many with their homes destroyed. Having pontificated about ‘the hour of Europe’, the EU had failed in its first real attempt at a unified foreign policy. In truth, it could not even police its own back yard. The UN had proved incapable of directing operations and had, in the end, effectively ceded power to NATO. The latter had, itself, been rent asunder by its members’ different notions of how much military risk to take. Two hunderd and fourteen soldiers had been killed and a further 1500 wounded trying to represent the UN’s divided will in Bosnia. The lessons The Times drew were that, ‘As we have long argued, this was a war that could be halted only when mediation was backed by effective firepower … Had the West been much more decisive, much earlier, this would not be such an unsatisfactory peace.’[28]

III

In the new year, twenty thousand United States soldiers arrived to join their NATO partners to help keep the Bosnian peace. The Times was convinced that the Dayton accord would not hold unless Washington showed itself to be firmly committed with troops on the ground. The American reticence was, however, understandable. President George Bush’s commitment to a new world order had met with a terrible reversal in one of its first tests – the war-torn state of Somalia. Backed by a UN Security Council Resolution, in December 1992 Bush had dispatched US forces there, the first wave of what would be a total deployment of more than 37,000 UN-backed troops sent in order to try and save Somalia from itself. There, rival warlords presided over bloody anarchy. Into this instability other organizations, including al-Qaeda, would come to insinuate themselves, but the original American invasion was a peacekeeping mission whose primary motivation was humanitarian. With famine gripping much of the country, one and a half million Somalis faced death through starvation. Only the deployment of troops appeared to be any guarantee that the foreign aid would reach those in need and not be looted by the warring militias.

Watching the US deployment was The Times’s Africa correspondent, Sam Kiley. He had been born in Kenya, the son of a journalist who had been exiled from South Africa because of his reporting. After a brief stint on the Johannesburg Star, Kiley went up to Oxford, becoming president of the OUDS – the dramatic society. Along with his student contemporary Boris Johnson, he was one of the first graduates Peter Stothard selected for The Times’ trainee scheme. Ever eager for a challenge, by August 1991 he was the paper’s man in Nairobi. It was a post to which he was temperamentally suited: ‘Africa Correspondent for The Times of London is the best job bar none in English language journalism’, he concluded after he had spent eight years in the position. The paper had maintained a South Africa bureau but had not covered the rest of sub-Saharan Africa adequately for decades. Despite this, Kiley found that he enjoyed the best of all worlds, with ‘the prestige of The Times and a continent to cover with foreign editors who let you pursue your story’. Single-handedly, he transformed the paper’s coverage without ever becoming jaded or losing his sense of intrepidness. Indeed, he could hardly believe his good fortune, noting of his daily toil, ‘You get paid to have adventures and go to amazing places and meet bizarre people.’[29] He had none of the starry-eyed idealism of the gap-year backpacker, admitting he preferred his own culture ‘to the primitive world of tribalism’ and the odiousness of most African leaders. What he loved was the heroism of individuals and the continent’s ‘Monty Pythonesque sense of the absurd. A well-timed joke can secure your life, or an interview with a president.’[30] For an enterprising journalist, these were ideal conditions in which to establish a reputation.

Staying alive was the first prerequisite. Somalia was so dangerous that even Kiley, an imposing figure, travelled with a bodyguard at all times. As he passed round the stalls of a Mogadishu arms bazaar, he was tossed primed grenades to catch while a drug-crazed child fired a shot at him from behind. ‘There is nothing like the cold terror one feels when coming close to being killed in a part of the world for which the rest of the planet has little sympathy,’ he confided.[31] Yet it was thanks to the information coming from him, and the small cadre of other reporters like him, that the world got to hear anything at all about what was happening to their fellow human beings in a country whose glorious beaches had once be promenaded by wealthy Italians. What worried him about the dispatch of US troops was that they soon showed themselves nervous about taking casualties and, in doing so, advertised to the Somali warlords their weakness. A possible opportunity to use overwhelming force and to disarm the groups was missed in favour of a minimalist strategy of using troops to guard the relief convoys and each other. Even the self-defence was ineffective. When the UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros Ghali, arrived in Mogadishu to see the aid distribution for himself, he quickly had to turn on his heels and flee the country, surrounded by a stone-throwing crowd.

There were at least thirteen major warlords of which General Muhammad Farrah Aidid was considered the most important. By the middle of 1993 it was clear that Operation Restore Hope was going badly. The Americans were supplemented by smaller forces from twenty-two other nations acting under a UN mandate. In June, 23 Pakistani UN peacekeepers were killed. US gunships responded by launching attacks on what they identified as Aidid targets, yet the occupiers (as many chose to see the UN presence) could not even gain mastery of Mogadishu and by July, the UN mission had succeeded in killing more than two hundred civilians in its botched attempt to smash Aidid’s compounds. Kiley stayed close to the action. He had established contact with Ali Hassan Osman, one of Aidid’s key aides, and observed the fire fights, one bullet coming within an inch of smashing through his bald dome. The American bungling was spectacular – on one occasion they absailed into a UN development programme building which they mistook for one of Aidid’s hideouts, arresting UN employees within. Worse was to follow. On 3 October, an attempt to drop around 120 elite US forces into a bustling sector of Mogadishu to abduct senior Aidid associates went badly wrong. Two Blackhawk helicopters were shot down, eighteen Americans were killed and a further seventy-eight wounded. By December, the Americans were ferrying Aidid to peace talks in Addis Ababa rather than into custody. In March 1994, President Clinton pulled American troops out of Somalia. Several hundred of Aidid’s ill-disciplined thugs had beaten 37,000 troops dispatched by the ‘international community’, backed by helicopter gunships and AC130 bombers. A year later, the rest of the UN mission, which had been cowering in its heavily fortified compounds, was called home. They left behind a country in as bad, or possibly worse, a condition as they had found it. In return, they had lost more than one hundred peacekeeping troops (thirty of them US troops) and spent billions of dollars in the process. Washington’s preparedness to take the fore in UN operations where there was no clear national self-interest was diminished. The Bush doctrine for the ‘new world order’ had not even lasted three years.

Worse atrocities took place in central Africa. In April 1994, a ceasefire between Rwanda’s two main tribes collapsed when the small country’s president was killed when his plane was shot down. It triggered an outbreak of genocide by the majority Hutu on the Tutsi who, although a minority, had not been forgiven for exercising disproportionate influence during Belgian colonization. The revenge exceeded imagination. By June, around 800,000 Tutsis (and moderate Hutus) had been murdered. The killing was led by Hutu militias, known as the Interahamwe. In turn, Hutu villagers rose up and murdered their Tutsi neighbours on pain of being themselves killed if they refused to partake in the act of collective madness. What was especially astounding was that, unlike the Nazis and their industrialized methods of annihilation, the Interahamwe relied on machetes and bashing skulls against tree stumps. The only break in their productivity came when tired or aching arms had to be rested.

The genocide lasted one hundred days and was brought to an end not by the intervention of the international community but by an invasion of Tutsi forces from Rwanda’s neighbouring countries. This, in turn, precipitated the flight of two million Hutus out of the country, fearing vengeance. From his base in Burundi, Kiley had begun driving in and out of Rwanda (it was too dangerous to spend more than several days at a time there) in May. Driving up to the front line, he had to abandon his car in the middle of a minefield and walk his way out – in the darkness. On other occasions, he made his way into the areas where the Hutus were running amok. To his horror, he discovered that the French – who led Operation Turquoise, the humanitarian relief expedition – were flying supplies to the Interahamwe. Furthermore, he believed that the relative ease with which he was able to move around Hutu-controlled areas was because he physically resembled a French commando and was thus assumed to be helping Hutu operations. ‘Vous êtes sur une mission?’ the Interahamwe asked at checkpoints. ‘Oui,’ he replied confidently and marched on. He witnessed at first hand massacres in a concentration camp.[32]

Kiley believed culpability was widely shared among all those who did too little. The Clinton administration had fought shy of even employing the word ‘genocide’. Kiley believed that ‘well-trained and armed Western soldiers could have stopped the slaughter in a matter of days’. His greatest fury, though, was directed at the Hutus’ chief patron, France. French policy makers were obsessed with the notion of the threat to Francophone Africa if the partly English-speaking Tutsi forces took power. Some French units were genuinely engaged in relief – indeed, Kiley had helped direct one officer to a scene of slaughter where there were still Tutsis hiding among the dead and in urgent need of help – but he surmised that other French officers had arrived believing they were there to shore up the Hutu government from Tutsi rebels.[33] Not only were the Hutus supplied with French arms (in breach of the UN embargo) but, even more brazenly, French forces rescued one of the genocide’s prime organizers, Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, and ferried him over to Cameroon where they thought (wrongly) he would be safe from extradition. Partly for his reporting on Rwanda, Kiley won the 1996 What The Papers Say award for best foreign correspondent.

Regardless of the debate over whether prompt action could have prevented the hundred days of madness in Rwanda, it was not in dispute that the international community had been weighed in the balance and found wanting. The failure to intervene to stop the murder of 800,000 Rwandans appeared to be of a piece with the failure to prevent the slaughter of perhaps 200,000 or more Bosnians. Tony Blair assured the 2001 Labour Party conference that if another Rwanda happened, ‘we would have a moral duty to act there’.[34] Problematically, there was no shortage of other claimants for direct intervention. African countries whose natural resources ought to have made them rich instead discovered that the fount of wealth watered little but corruption and warfare. Kiley witnessed the anarchy of Zaire in the last years of President Mobutu’s rule. Mobutu and his cronies had run a kleptocracy, plundering the wealth of a country rich in copper, cobalt, zinc and diamonds. The President’s own wealth was estimated at £6 billion. Kiley toured Kikwit, a city of 300,000 that had been without running water for two years. The tarmaced streets were breaking up under the force of nature beneath and the bush was reclaiming suburban gardens. The city, like Zaire itself, was returning to the jungle.[35] This did not prevent covetous looks from its neighbours. Most of them invaded. One of the first was Rwanda. It used the excuse of crushing Interahamwe rebels who had crossed into Zaire as its reason for occupying a diamond-rich sector of the country. Clearly, the scramble for Africa had not ended with the lowering of European flags over the continent. In 1997 Mobutu was toppled by Laurent Kabila and Zaire was renamed Democratic Republic of Congo. It was no improvement. Kabila was assassinated in 2001. The country continued to be exploited and fought over, not least by its neighbours. In the four years after 1998, aid agencies estimated that the death toll – direct and indirect – from war in Kabila’s country was heading towards three million.

Part of the international community’s problem was that the African states proved unable to police their own region effectively or without self-interest. Even well-intentioned interventions were mishandled. Covering South Africa’s inept 1998 attempt at restoring order by invading Lesotho, Kiley was stopped at a checkpoint, mistaken for one of the invaders and shot. The bullet entered his right shoulder; his face was peppered with fragments of windscreen. Despite his injury and loss of blood, he managed to swing the car into reverse and retreat – under a hail of gunfire – before making it to a South African medic at the border. He lived to tell the tale: ‘I have always wondered what it would be like to be shot. It hurts. It is like being hit with a sledgehammer.’[36] Patched up, he soon found far worse atrocities in Sierra Leone, a once prosperous British colony whose democratic government in Freetown was under pressure from Foday Sankoh’s coalition of guerrillas and gangsters who raped and maimed those who stood between them and the country’s diamond mines. Kiley wrote a commentary in The Times, appealing for Britain and the UN to lead a rescue mission. If humanitarian reasons were not considered sufficient, he asked whether the prospect of a new regime in Freetown being ‘able to shop their arms, drugs, and knocked-down nuclear warheads under Sierra Leonean flags of convenience’ was a good enough reason to intervene.[37] The following year, Tony Blair committed British troops to shoring up Freetown’s embattled democrats against their homicidal opponents. The operation was unquestionably one of the Blair government’s major foreign policy successes. It came on the back of another effort to intervene in the affairs of an increasingly lawless province. Once again, war had come to the Balkans. Over Kosovo, Blair was not prepared to offer the same half-measures that had failed the peoples of Bosnia.

Serbia regarded Kosovo as not only an integral party of its territory but also a province whose spiritual and historical significance was core to Serb identity. This the international community recognized. The Dayton accord reaffirmed that Kosovo was part of Serbia. However, a fast-expanding birth rate among its ethnic Albanian Muslim population had taken their proportion to 90 per cent of the province by 1992 where it had been two-thirds thirty years earlier. During the 1970s and 1980s, relations between the ethnic Albanian and Serb inhabitants of Kosovo deteriorated. In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic seized his opportunity to profit from the discontent by leading a rally of more than one million Serbs at the site of the battle of Kosovo Polje on its 600th anniversary (the historic defeat had ensured the Orthodox Serbs were subjected to five centuries of Muslim Ottoman rule). Tito had granted Kosovo a substantial measure of autonomy within Serbia. Milosevic, however, put the process into reverse, clawing back power to Belgrade in the new Serbian constitution of 1989. Like Tito before him, Milosevic ruled out the ethnic Albanians’ aspiration for secession.

The heavy-handed and repressive treatment of Kosovo’s Albanians marginalized their more moderate politicians. By 1998, a new force had come to prominence – the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The KLA was armed in part from money raised by its émigré community’s involvement with organized crime. Its tactics were not only to confront Serb authority but also to attract international attention and support by deliberately inciting Serb special forces into committing reprisal atrocities. It was an astute assessment, given the ease with which the supposed forces of law and order duly demonstrated their prevalence for acts of extreme thuggery against entire villages and families. These acts generated far more international condemnation than the KLA’s smaller, more cynical, acts of provocation. By May 1998, 40 per cent of Kosovo was in the KLA’s hands and Serb attempts to combat the insurgency created a stream of refugees. Here, it seemed, was a fresh Serb act of ethnic cleansing. Only the threat of NATO air strikes forced Milosevic to permit monitors from the OSCE. In the new year, with revelations of a fresh Serb outrage in the village of Racak in which forty-five fleeing ethnic Albanians were shot and hacked to death, Milosevic and the Albanian Kosovar leadership were persuaded to negotiate at Rambouillet. There, even although the KLA were still refusing to disarm, the Contact Group ordered Milosevic to agree to a referendum in Kosovo within three years (which would all but certainly result in a vote to secede) and to permit NATO troops throughout Serbia. These were humiliating terms. Milosevic was not prepared to accept them. With his refusal, NATO prepared, for the first time in its history, to attack a sovereign country whose boundaries were recognized in international law. The action did not have direct UN sanction.

On 24 March 1999, Operation Allied Force began with air sorties and missile attacks on Serbia’s air defence and communications structure. Despite the firepower at its disposal, NATO was disadvantaged by having to agree policy between all nineteen member governments. Although military strategists had raised doubts about whether a war could be won by aerial bombing alone, the governments could not agree on invading with their armies. Clinton had publicly pledged that American troops would not be deployed. This may have given Milosevic hope that he could ride out the storm. He also looked to Russian assertiveness to frighten off any decision that did involve a ground invasion. In one respect, the NATO assault played into the Serb nationalists’ hands. Far from preventing their violent harassment of the Albanian Kosovars, the Serbs found that being under attack provided them with a perfect cover to intensify their ethnic cleansing of the province. Within days of Operation Allied Force commencing, Kosovo’s stream of refugees turned into a mass exodus with more than 300,000 being displaced or fleeing from their homes. The numbers swelled beyond 700,000 in the succeeding weeks. Sam Kiley was stationed on Albania’s border with Kosovo where he reported ‘a damburst of people’[38] flooding over while Stephen Farrell described similar scenes from his position on the Macedonian border.

In Wapping, the leader writers had laid out The Times’s own grand strategy the previous June. ‘Only a clear readiness to make a substantial ground deployment before any peace agreement will demonstrate that Nato means what it says’ the editorial warned. ‘The only possible resolution for Kosovo is autonomy within Serbia; any intervention would be to preserve Serbia, not destroy it.’[39] The chances of Kosovo remaining thereafter a part of Serbia would, it believed, be better served if Milosevic gave way to a new regime better able to present a more liberal, multi-ethnic future. As the air war gathered momentum, the paper also stated its preference that once victory had been secured, turning Kosovo into an interim international protectorate was a lesser evil than the alternative – partition in which the province would become Albanian save for a few Serb enclaves.[40] As for the conduct of the military operation, The Times believed not only in the air war but that the weight of ordnance dropped needed to be stepped up if troops were not to be committed for a ground invasion. It especially despaired of Clinton’s public refusal to contemplate a ground attack. This only convinced the Serbs that they could avoid defeat by sitting out the aerial bombardment, it argued. Throughout the campaign – and especially after the air war showed few signs of achieving victory on its own – The Times repeatedly argued that NATO needed to proceed in a manner that ensured Belgrade took seriously the prospect of a ground invasion. In leading articles written by Rosemary Righter and Tim Hames, the paper also left its readers in no doubt that a ground war was preferable to what might prove the only alternative – a humiliating admission of defeat.[41]

For Times journalists on the ground the situation was acutely dangerous. Anthony Loyd was filing from Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, in the last days before the war commenced. The previous week a London-based source had warned him that an ultra-nationalist Serb group in Kosovo had put a price on his head. ‘The threat was vague and unformed, so I stayed on,’ Loyd concluded. Nonchalance was to be one of the war’s first victims. He realized he was in trouble when his potential armed guard turned out to be a plainclothes policeman who had once beaten him up. Loyd slipped away the next morning intending to get behind the KLA’s lines but he was stopped at one of their checkpoints and forced back. On his return journey to Pristina he received a call on his mobile phone warning him that the Serb police were searching for him. In Kosovo in 1999, the police were a licensed death squad, murdering and maiming at will. Heeding the warning this time, Loyd headed off back towards KLA-held territory. He was stopped at a Serb checkpoint. ‘Screaming and with guns levelled’ they encouraged him to retrace his steps. After a further tip-off – ‘the police are after you’ – in Pristina, he drove south towards the Macedonian border. There he found streams of refugees being pushed back by Macedonian guards taunting them that ‘Albania is for the Albanians’. Loyd crossed the border, relieved, but conscious that ‘the difference between me and two million Kosovo Albanians was that I could escape’.[42]

The refugees’ plight dominated the news coverage. Some commentators suggested the numbers involved were being greatly exaggerated. It was thus important that, in Janine di Giovanni, The Times had a courageous reporter moving among the tidal wave of dismal humanity. ‘They are coming across the freezing border on bicycles, or walking, pushing babies in prams,’ she filed from Rozaje on the Kosovo-Montenegro border. ‘They’re in their slippers. They wear plastic bags on their heads to shield them from the snow. They carry whatever they can.’ Many had fled from Pec, Kosovo’s second city. One woman was quoted stating, ‘they took all the sick people who were Albanians out of the hospital. My neighbour, a Serb, who I’ve known for years, came and became my enemy. They killed doctors, teachers, anything alive.’ Another man said simply, ‘It is history that has done this.’ In her report, di Giovanni added a note of urgency of her own: ‘These people appear to be left to fend for themselves. As I write this from the mountain-top checkpoint, it is freezing cold and those left outside will not survive the night.’[43]

Janine di Giovanni was an American of Italian descent who had moved to London in 1985. She had reported the Bosnian war for the Sunday Times, meeting her future French husband in the siege-bound journalists’ barracks of the Sarajevo Holiday Inn. She was acclimatized to acute danger. She was also one of the first journalists to get back into Kosovo after the Serb onslaught in the last days of March 1999. Surrounded with two French colleagues on a mountainside by Serb troops, she was marched at gunpoint down the hill and then stopped by other Serb troops who became almost demented with anger when they examined the passports and found an incriminating photograph of di Giovanni’s colleagues working with UN peacekeeping troops. One soldier spoke a little Italian. Di Giovanni attempted to reason with him, mentioning that her parents were Italian. ‘You we arrest,’ he replied, ‘the French we kill.’ She was at a loss to understand what followed. After driving towards Pec for about twenty minutes, the Serbs stopped the car, returned the journalists’ possessions and kissed di Giovanni on the cheek. ‘“Italiana,” they said, “never come back here.”’[44]

By April, NATO had taken the war into a yet more serious dimension by hitting Belgrade with cruise missiles. A heavily populated European capital city was now under direct attack. Twelve days later NATO mistakenly hit a train carrying civilians and, two days later, killed up to seventy-five Kosovan Albanian refugees it mistook for a Serb convoy. The longer the air war went on, the more The Times became uneasy about the political resolve supporting it. Far from finding a formula that brought Russia more closely into decision making, the leading article of 7 May argued, ‘The Alliance is nearing the point where Serb forces have been so damaged that Nato troops could be committed at acceptable risk.’ In this assumption, the paper was trusting NATO’s estimates of damage done, when it would have been better believing the Serbs’ assessment. Nonetheless, the leading article continued, ‘It has never been clearer that the best prospect for peace worthy of the name is to give war a chance.’[45] Later that day, a NATO missile smashed into the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.

It was important that The Times did not just print reports filed from those caught up on the KLA side of the lines. The paper also stationed Tom Walker in the Serbian capital where he reported the effects of NATO bombing on a terrified and angry population. He was joined by Eve-Ann Prentice. At the end of May, Prentice was travelling with a small group of journalists in south-west Kosovo when NATO jets hurtled towards her on a mission to bomb a nearby road tunnel. ‘I heard a phenomenal noise and thought it was the last thing I would hear on Earth,’ she recalled. ‘I was thrown to the ground, and was amazed when the thick-grey black smoke cleared to discover that I was still alive.’ One of the cars had been taken out, as had its driver/interpreter. As the next wave of jets thundered in, Prentice scrambled into a water culvert. More bombs exploded all around. She had cut legs and was badly shaken. Eventually she and her remaining companions were rescued by Serb troops and ended up being comforted and given generous hospitality at one of their army bases. She subsequently discovered that the commanding officer had wanted to release her overnight into the sniper infested mountains but Milosevic had personally radioed the camp ordering that the journalists should be well treated. His motives were not necessarily governed by altruism alone.[46]

Blair was moving towards seeking a ground invasion but Clinton remained reluctant to perform a U-turn. Meanwhile, the KLA continued in their efforts to secure the province. Janine di Giovanni had not been especially impressed with the martial quality of some of those she had seen at a training camp at Papaj on the Albanian border. She considered them a ‘motley bunch, wearing uniforms donated by Germany and T-shirts provided by the Love Parade, a gay annual celebration in Berlin’.[47] By early May, Anthony Loyd was back in Kosare, in southern Kosovo, with the KLA and discovered that their quality as a fighting unit had much improved.[48] By mid-May, di Giovanni had advanced with a KLA unit into south-west Kosovo, frequently flinging herself face down in ditches as first NATO jets (by mistake) dropped cluster bombs on them and then the Serbs pinned them down with a relentless bombardment, killing and wounding fighters with whom she found herself sharing every hardship and cigarette.

In fact, the war was moving towards its endgame not so much because of the tactics deployed as by the fears of what might follow. On 19 May, Clinton’s hostility to a ground invasion publicly softened. Attempts by the Russians to mediate were supplemented by a delegation led by the Finnish President, Martti Ahtisaari. The belief that Clinton was finally moving towards a ground invasion concentrated both Russian and Serbian minds. NATO’s bombing campaign was suspended on 10 June when Milosevic began pulling his forces out of Kosovo. While NATO prepared to dispatch fifty thousand troops to police the peace, Russia asserted its right to involvement by speeding troops stationed in Bosnia over to Pristina airport. With extraordinary recklessness, the NATO commander, General Wesley Clark, ordered the deployment of British paratroopers and Gurkhas to Pristina to confront and repel the Russians. With Tony Blair’s backing, General Sir Mike Jackson, the British commander, refused amid heated talk of risking a third world war.

As the peacekeeping force, K-For, began to establish itself in Kosovo, the extent of the violence the province had endured became more apparent. Michael Evans, The Times’s defence editor, inspected a torture chamber under a Serb Interior Ministry police station in Pristina. ‘The smell of death and suffering is everywhere. The claustrophobia is overwhelming,’ he wrote. Implements of medieval barbarity lay around. Pornography was strewn about everywhere as were boxes of industrial-strength condoms. There was a metal-framed bed with a restraining leather strap and a mattress riddled with bullet holes. In the main chamber he found on a ledge a baby’s single blue shoe. ‘Is it possible they tortured babies, too, in this hole?’ he wrote in despair.[49] There were other discoveries of a different kind. Far from having been pulverized by the NATO bombing, the Serb forces retreated in good order. The claim that 122 tanks had been destroyed was demonstrably false. Three damaged T55s were found while the Serbs admitted another ten had been hit. Around four hundred Serb soldiers (but more than a thousand civilian Serbs) were killed, not much of a return on 11,000 strikes and 29,000 sorties against Serbia. As Eve-Ann Prentice had witnessed and reported at the time, the basic utilities had remained operational in Pristina even after two months of the bombing campaign.[50] Milosevic’s will appeared to have crumbled not because of the military success of the aerial bombing but because he feared there would be a ground invasion and that Russia could no longer be counted upon to prevent it. The figure of 100,000 missing (presumed murdered) ethnic Albanian men that had been bandied about during the campaign was also shown to have been without foundation. The Times, at least, had never endorsed such a high figure. With the conflict’s end, the estimate was downgraded to ten thousand and possibly less.

Three thousand six hundred Russian troops participated in K-FOR. Despite the peacekeeping force’s best endeavours, the future looked bleak for Kosovo. It offered hope for the displaced Albanians to return to the towns and villages from which they had been driven but the prospects for reconciliation and economic revival remained poor. The former KLA continued to act in its dual role of part police force, part local mafia. The level of organized crime was uncontainable. The future for the non-Albanians was dire. Within a year of the end of the NATO air war, 100,000 Kosovo Serbs had fled the region. Tom Walker filed reports that shielded Times readers from none of the horrors perpetrated against them. Nothing was sacred. Monasteries were desecrated, as were nuns. K-FOR found itself having to defend those who remained against the vengeance of Albanians intent on pursuing an ‘ethnic cleansing’ agenda of their own.

The military occupation of Kosovo, as of Bosnia, was clearly no temporary arrangement. Bosnia-Herzegovina was governed by a myriad different authorities. Given the network of corruption within the country, it was not an obvious magnet for foreign investment. In Ulster, as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the ‘peace process’ involved diminishing, rather than strengthening, direct accountability in the hope that this reduced the appeal to sectarian partisanship. Political systems of extraordinary complexity were envisaged in order to ensure power sharing. Yet a lack of accountability was not in itself conducive to good government. In Bosnia’s case, effective power rested not with any representative body but with the High Representative, the international community’s viceroy in the region. Kosovo, too, looked certain to remain similarly governed in the years ahead. Being run by foreigners was not in itself the key to a long term solution, but it did curtail the level of violence.

With his Serb assertiveness, Milosevic had successfully contributed to the ruination of the constituent parts of what had once been Yugoslavia. In so doing, he had also despoiled his beloved Serbia. For most of the previous eight years, Serbia had been subject to economic sanctions. The economy was in a state of collapse. His actions in Kosovo had led to it being occupied by a multinational force and, with the flight of much of its Serb minority, a question mark remaining over its future as even a nominal part of Serbia. The Times had argued that the best hope of maintaining Kosovo within Serbia lay with Milosevic’s removal from power in Belgrade. This proved to be one of the aftertremors of the Kosovo war. On 24 September 2000, Milosevic committed his final act of defiance by refusing to concede defeat to Vojislav Kostunica, the opposition candidate who appeared to have won the presidential election. The consequence was not supine acceptance from a cowed people but mass protests and the beginnings of a general strike. On 5 and 6 October, more than half a million protestors assembled in Belgrade. The Parliament building was set on fire. Milosevic was finally forced out after thirteen years of miscalculation. On 9 October, international sanctions against Yugoslavia were lifted. The following year Milosevic was flown to The Hague to stand trial charged with war crimes before the newly convened International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The new world order was being rebuilt, this time as a legal entity.

IV

During the 1980s, policy makers in Washington DC, had watched the Soviet Union’s military difficulties in Afghanistan with ill-concealed glee. They saw the Soviet withdrawal as a Cold War victory for the forces of Communist containment. The Islamic world saw it differently and took heart, drawing the lesson that Islamic warriors could defeat the technologically superior forces of foreign imperialism (albeit when armed and bankrolled by the United States and Saudi Arabia). Afghanistan had other legacies. Resisting the Soviet invader not only proved a useful military training ground for the native tribesmen but also for the thousands of co-religionists who joined the jihad against the infidel.

The collapse of Soviet Communism only sharpened the fault line between the Orthodox and Muslim peoples of the Caucasus. In 1992, Moscow intervened to shore up the forces of its embattled satellite government in Tajikistan, retaking the capital, Dushanbe, and driving the state’s Islamic insurgents back to the Afghan border where their cause was kept alive with arms and money from friendly Arab states. In Northern Ossetia and Chechnya, ethnic sensitivities continued to be tense between the Russian settlers and the native Muslims. The latter had been deported by Stalin and had returned, after the dictator’s death, to find their land and status much diminished. In 1992, Muslims from Ingushetia fought Orthodox Ossetians for control over disputed property. Russian ‘peacekeeping’ forces assisted the Ossetian destruction of Ingush villages in Northern Ossetia.

In Chechnya, the regime of Dzhokhar Dudayev was a byword for corruption. Market day in the capital, Grozny, more closely resembled an arms bazaar. In 1994 Dudayev responded to the increasingly militant Islamism of the Caucasus by proposing to make Chechnya an Islamic state operating Sharia law. Moscow looked on with alarm, concerned that Chechnya was becoming – like the West Bank was to Israel – a safe haven for terrorist operatives. In 1994, a mismanaged coup led by Russian troops posing as mercenaries ended in disaster. A formal invasion followed. Grozny was shelled. Armoured columns were lost in its streets as locals took it in turns to destroy the ill-conceived Russian advance with the private arsenal at their disposal. Anatole Leiven had been in Grozny reporting the attack for The Times and was joined by Richard Beeston. In January 1995, Beeston was relieved in turn by Anthony Loyd. ‘The Russian gunners are operating with total disregard for humanitarian principles and killing their own people en masse as a result, in salvoes on a scale I have never seen before,’ Loyd reported from his vantage point on the ground floor of a stone building. ‘For the wounded lying in the ruins there is no place of safety, no morphine, and very few bandages. The dead are just left to rot.’[51] Appalled by the Russian army’s indiscriminate actions, he was also staggered by its ‘blinding incompetence.’ Conscripts and tanks were dispatched into urban areas where they were easily blown up by rocket-propelled grenades.

The Chechens’ problem, as Loyd pointed out, was that ‘successful guerrilla campaigns rely on superpower backing: the Chechens have none’.[52] America might have been happy to pay for the Soviet Union to be embarrassed in Afghanistan, but helping Chechens destabilize Boris Yeltsin was a different proposition entirely. While London and Washington felt they had the motive and the firepower to protect the Muslims of Kosovo against Milosevic, safeguarding the Muslims of Chechnya by preventing the Kremlin from suppressing revolt in its backyard was neither possible nor desirable. The new wars for human rights, however trumpeted in lofty rhetoric, did not have universal application. Realpolitik remained the ultimate break on action. The Chechens took assistance from Islam’s itinerant guerrillas instead, a fact that further muted Western interest in their cause. Loyd interviewed the Chechen commander, General Aslan Maskhadov, in his bunker as well as his fighters, one of whom took pride in the fact that his capital had held out for thirty-seven days before being overrun by the Russians while Berlin in 1945 had lasted only a fortnight.[53] Despite hoisting the Russian flag over the ruins of the presidential palace, the occupiers soon discovered the cost of attempting to hold the city.

Comparing it to his experiences in Bosnia, Kosovo or (in 2001) Afghanistan, Loyd found being on the front line in Chechyna ‘by far the most terrifying experience of my life’. He was familiar with death, barbarism and mutilation, but in Grozny ‘the intensity of violence was much greater’. Covering the other conflicts, his main concern had been ‘the normal things like being shot by a sniper or stepping on a mine’, but crouching in central Grozny while the Russians blasted the city into concrete shards involved witnessing hundreds of humans being killed and wounded in minutes. What was more, he found himself in this situation for hours at a time.[54] In April 1996, Dudayev was killed by a missile that tapped onto his mobile phone signal. In July 1996, the Chechens took back Grozny. Yeltsin tried to get out of the mess, and Chechyna was granted autonomy. It proved in no position to exercise the freedom wisely. Real power had long since switched to its warlords and assorted criminals. Money from Muslim sources in the Middle East, where the struggle was seen as another jihad, helped ensure that terrorism continued to flourish. Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, met fire with fire. In 1999, Russia reinvaded. Ten years after the first attempt to seize Grozny, half of Chechnya’s one million population was assumed dead or exiled. The Russian army was suffering higher losses than it had endured in Afghanistan. While much of the British public paid fleeting attention to the disorders in the Caucasus, The Times continued its mission to gather what information it could from a part of the world that had become inaccessible to all but the most intrepid and cunning reporters. The leader-writing team was bolstered by the arrival of Vanora Bennett, a journalist with extensive Russian experience and the author of Crying Wolf, a study of Chechnya’s woes. Loyd returned to the country in October 1999 in time to catch the worst of Putin’s onslaught. Russian bombing had intensified the previous month. There had been more than three thousand kidnappings there since August 1996 and the Chechens, reinforced by Islamic fundamentalists, had produced gruesome videos showing the victims being tortured to death. It was estimated that of the fifty foreigners who entered Chechnya in 1998, thirty-eight were taken hostage. These were not good odds. Loyd decided to hire some gunmen to protect him. Even that was a gamble and he conceded that in ‘moments of intense paranoia’ he wondered if they had worked out what his ransom was worth. At one point, he was the only Western journalist in the country. Without him, there was little prospect of accurate facts emerging from its borders, which Russian troops had sealed. He was arrested trying to get back into the country in the company of an American photographer friend and a wealthy Bangladeshi who had a fax purportedly from Vladimir Putin granting him permission to enter Chechnya. Loyd only just had time to eat the page of his notebook containing the name of the contact he was due to meet before he was dragged off to detention under suspicion of being a spy. One officer conducted an overnight interrogation while wearing a balaclava and playing an Elvis Presley cassette of Love Me Tender. Another began the session by putting Loyd’s British passport into a drawer and whispering with almost caricature villainy, ‘Without it you have no identity. You do not exist. And that is what we can do to you if we wish – make you disappear.’ It was, Loyd conceded, not a promising start.[55] Finally, after three days of unrelenting cross-examination, he was released.

Loyd’s brush with the Russian intelligence community did not put an end to The Times’s effort to uncover the truth about what was going on. Janine di Giovanni was one of only two journalists (the other was a German photographer) still in Grozny when it fell to the Russians again in February 2000 after a 102-day siege. Her situation was precarious. ‘Unlike Bosnia, Kosovo or East Timor,’ she admitted, ‘there are no aid workers inside Chechnya, no medical relief teams, no United Nations.’ She was placing her survival entirely in the hands of Chechen rebels who had a habit of taking outsiders hostage prior, often, to killing them. Grozny’s fall did not end the struggle. The rebels who survived the city’s bombardment escaped by walking across a minefield. With the Russians left to occupy the pile of rubble that had once been a capital city of 400,000 people, di Giovanni moved to the village of Alkhan Kala where she was given hospitality. This place, in turn, became surrounded by Russian troops, closing in for the kill. Local women dressed her up as a headscarf-wearing peasant and, in this disguise, she made her getaway with two of them and a baby in a car that was driven down an icy road at full speed. As she looked back, she ‘saw the column of Russian tanks with their guns mounted, moving steadfastly into the village, the soldiers cockily hanging off the sides’.[56] She survived to collect the What The Papers Say award for Foreign Correspondent of the Year.

V

Despite the bloodshed in the Balkans, the Caucasus and in Africa, the twentieth century ended with considerable evidence that Western values had indeed triumphed after all. Except in agriculture, where it suited the producers (if not the consumers) of the United States and the EU to be dyed-in-the-wool protectionists, trade barriers were continuing to come down. Instant global communications helped to ensure the triumph of the market. Membership of its quasi-governing body, the World Trade Organisation (as GATT was rebranded), was the badge of all nations with aspirations towards economic respectability. Even the formerly Maoist republic of China prepared for accession. Nor was the world merely being made safe for capitalists. Political liberalism also received official endorsement. The UN’s courts trying those implicated in the horrors of Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia were the first fruits of a new international jurisprudence. Most nations of the world, including Britain, began signing up to create an International Criminal Court, investing it with the powers to try those suspected of crimes against humanity, war crimes or genocide from any country that failed to prosecute them itself. The former President of Chile, Augusto Pinochet, found himself arrested while in Britain for a hospital operation on the basis of a warrant from a Spanish judge who believed he was implicated in political murders that had taken place during his period of power in South America.

Not everyone in the West was excited by these developments. The left protested against the economic liberalism of globalization. Gatherings of the World Trade Organisation were accompanied by riots on the streets as left leaning and anarchist protesters from all nations congregated to condemn globalization. At the same time, the right was apprehensive about a committee of liberal lawyers sitting in judgment over the world’s politicians and soldiers. There were anomalies, not least in Ulster where liberals tended to support the political imperative of sharing power with murderous gangsters rather than the legal imperative of holding them accountable for their crimes. Whether the world would be made safer by legal incursions on the exercise of realpolitik remained to be seen. Despite the qualms, the process went ahead unchecked. Yet this new order was not remotely taking over the whole planet. In the Muslim world – covering one-fifth of humanity – the pax liberalis was not so keenly felt. Its military, monarchical and dictatorial regimes were not swept away by the march of democracy that pinned red-blooded Communism back to North Korea, Cuba and a handful of other enclaves. Secularly administered Turkey was one of the few Muslim countries that remained fully democratic throughout the 1990s.

Indeed, the Muslim world confounded the West less because it was moving in the slow lane towards liberal values than because large tracts of it appeared to be moving in the opposite direction. There, the headway was being made by Islamic fundamentalism.

As the Islamist threat began to assert itself, there were attempts in the West to explain this anger as a product of resentment at economic inequality. In short, selfish capitalist hubris had brought forth a nemesis from the disempowered. On closer inspection, there were considerable problems with this overly simple analysis. In some of the countries where fundamentalism flourished most ardently, oil was reversing the master and servant relationship with the energy-dependent West. Perversely, the fuel for Islamic fundamentalism came from modernization. Many of those who came to prominence as terrorist leaders were first-generation university graduates from lower-middle-class, but not poor, families. Some, like Osama bin Laden, came from backgrounds of ostentatious wealth accumulated through Saudi Arabia’s building boom. Like so many other revolutionary movements, the Islamist revival was in large part, a youth movement. As well as providing educational opportunities, the process of modernization boosted the birth rate. A swelling and youthful population in Arab countries migrated to cities. In these sprawling, anonymous urban environments, faith became a pronounced and militant badge of identity. It was in the cities that so many of the charitable, educational and medical organizations upon which inhabitants came to rely were provided by religious, and often hard-line Islamist movements. Indeed, religious charity successfully filled the void left by corrupt state governments that failed to provide reliable or comprehensive services themselves. Thus, civil society was a product of faith, rather than the font of state or secular provision.

Islamic fundamentalism was concerned not only with confronting the infidels living in Israel and its supporting states in the West; it developed out of a sense of outrage at the inefficiency, corruption and self-serving worldliness of its own region’s temporal rulers. The Arab nation states created out of the vanquished and vanished Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War failed to engage the emotional loyalties of their subjects in the same way as those in the Christian world had done. Instead, loyalties remained strongest either at the local levels of family, village and tribe or at the pan-national level of Islamist and Arab awakening. Furthermore, whatever the claims of the various Islamic nation states to lead the Muslim world, none of them attained pre-eminence. None proved able to assert commanding leadership over the others. The consequence not only prevented a strong mediating regional power being able to settle neighbourly disputes (thereby insuring the West intervened) but also underlined the power of Islam as a force greater than any temporal power among the faithful.

As the Islamist revival began to assert itself towards the end of the 1970s, the response from many of the Arab governments was one of appeasement. Radical clerics spreading their message in the mosques of the sprawling cities to impressionable youths generally received less persecution than liberal reformers committed to democracy. Some organizations, like the Muslim Brotherhood, were actively funded and encouraged by regimes such as Saudi Arabia. The accommodation of Islamism by nervous regimes was not confined to Arab states. In the 1970s, Bangladesh dropped its secular constitutional commitments. Pakistan adopted the sharia as its supreme law. Elsewhere, Suharto’s Indonesia increasingly Islamicized its laws and Malaysia developed a twin secular and Islamic legal system.

The Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 suggested that fundamentalism was winning, spurred by Ayatolah Khomeini’s instruction that, ‘To kill and be killed is the supreme duty of every Muslim.’ The suicide bombs directed at the US presence in Beirut – and Reagan’s response to scuttle out – suggested that the fearlessness of faith was more than a match for Western technological superiority. The Iranian commentator Amir Taheri provided thoughtful perspectives on the Op-Ed page of The Times. In 1989, he reflected that the decade had witnessed the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism but not its victory. Iran failed to overcome Iraq and Baghdad remained under the control of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime. Neither Egypt nor the Lebanon became a theocracy. Pakistan elected a woman, Benazir Bhutto, and elections in Malaysia, Jordan and Tunisia restricted, rather than hastened the path of the extremists. ‘Today, the Islamic fundamentalist movement is almost everywhere in retreat,’ Taheri believed. But he was not complacent. He warned that it would ‘return with a vengeance’ if the Muslim states turned away from the process of democratization.[57]

The Arab nations’ inability to sort out their own affairs was laid bare when in 1991 the American-led coalition delivered a drubbing to the Iraqi forces. Even though many Islamic governments had sided with the UN-endorsed coalition to free Kuwait, the attitude of their populations was very different. This was not just what Western commentators described with intriguing imprecision as the mood on the ‘Arab street’. Even many Arab intellectuals regarded Western military action in their part of the world as a far greater outrage than Saddam Hussein’s original boundary transgression. The presence of infidel troops in Saudi Arabia, the land of Islam’s holiest sites, was especially singled out as an abomination. Resentment at the West intensified. Subsequent aerial bombing missions over Iraq, intended to enforce the no-fly zones and the UN resolutions, enjoyed little support from Arab governments, even those that had sanctioned the original mission into Kuwait.

Meanwhile, Algeria appeared to be on the brink. The Islamist FIS’s challenge for power was only halted by the cancellation of the 1992 elections. Western protests at this retreat from democratic principles were understandably muted. However, Afghanistan joined Iran and Sudan as the third country to be swept up by the fundamentalists when, between 1994 and 1996, the Taleban, a theocratic movement of merciless severity whose warriors had been trained in Pakistan, gained control over the majority of the country. They beat back the mujahidin tribes that, having seen off the Soviet invasion, made the mistake of reverting to infighting among themselves. The spectre of Osama bin Laden began to cast a shadow, at first fleetingly, over the pages of The Times in 1997 when Christopher Thomas, filing from Kandahar, drew attention to bin Laden’s presence in the city with his three wives in tow. ‘Mr Bin Laden is living near the derelict airport,’ Thomas wrote, ‘hidden from view because, even for Taleban, which claims to have ended his terrorist activities, he is an embarrassment.’[58] Embarrassment or not, it was soon evident that Mr bin Laden had not gone into retirement. On the contrary, his al-Qaeda terrorist network broadened its focus from undermining insufficiently fundamentalist Arab regimes to hitting the United States and its interests. Al-Qaeda was blamed for a lorry bomb that had killed nineteen Americans at a barracks in Saudi Arabia and wounding nearly four hundred others in June 1996. This was but a foretaste of what was to come. In February 1998, bin Laden announced he was launching a ‘pitiless’ war against ‘Jews and Crusaders’. He proved as good as his word when, in August, al-Qaeda lorry bombers blew up the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, killing 224 – overwhelmingly in Nairobi – of which twelve were American and injuring five thousand, most of whom were locals. Failing to kill bin Laden with air strikes, by November, the US was offering $5 million for his capture. He remained at large. In October 2000, al-Qaeda struck again with a suicide attack on the USS Cole while it was docked in Aden, killing seventeen and injuring thirty-nine American sailors.

On 11 September 2001, the principal leader writers were enjoying lunch with the independent directors of the Times Newspapers Holdings Board when news was brought to Les Hinton, the company’s executive chairman, that there had been an attack on the heart of America. Hinton broke the news to his guests. Apologizing, the leader writers cast aside their napkins and made their way as promptly as decorum allowed out of the dining room. When they returned to their office it was to discover that a succession of hijacked planes had slammed into the Pentagon in Washington DC, and both towers of the World Trade Center in New York.

Another journalist who would not easily forget where he was when the news broke was The Times’s new US editor, Nicholas Wapshott. Inconveniently, he was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He had opted for the majestic leisureliness of taking up his duties by arriving in America with his family on the QE2. For The Times, this was potentially a disaster. The outgoing US editor, Ben MacIntyre, had already departed and now his replacement was quite literally all at sea. Managing to telephone Wapping from on board, Wapshott announced that he would file from the ship, only to discover that the office had decided he could not be of much practical use. Matters for the new US editor then got worse. Rather than docking in the lea of Manhattan, the QE2 was diverted to Canada, drifting him yet further away from the action. Nor was Wapshott the only Times journalist caught off guard by al-Qaeda’s lightning strike. Having spent the previous three years reporting Westminster politics, Roland Watson was in his first fortnight as the paper’s new Washington correspondent and, like George W. Bush, was down in the Deep South when news of the attack broke. Unlike the President, Watson did not have Air Force One to whisk him away and, with all flights grounded because of the emergency, he had to drive as fast as he could to New York in time to cover the aftermath. En route, he checked into a motel room near Savannah, Georgia where he set up a temporary office to file copy to Wapping. The motel receptionist became suspicious of the stressed looking guest who was feverishly trying to place calls, was receiving faxes about missile defence and refused to let an employee into his room to change the towel. Listening at the door she thought she overheard him saying something like ‘Falcon thirty-one secure’. She called the FBI.[59]

It was James Bone who saved The Times from the humiliation of having no staff reporter in situ to cover one of the most dramatic news stories in living memory. By chance, he had been several streets away – just emerging from a newsagent – when the first plane cruised into the north tower of the World Trade Center and was an eyewitness as the flames licked down it. Twenty minutes later, he stared in disbelief as the southern tower was hit. He watched as helpless souls jumped from the inferno to their certain deaths, and this proved the starting point for his report that led The Times the following day. He conveyed the unfolding horror, quoted witnesses and reported everything that could be seen at the time without the temptation to coat it with grandiloquent prose. It was not a story that needed varnishing. While those around him turned to get away, Bone knew he had to get as close as possible. He explained how, ‘immediately after the two attacks, thousands of people streamed north up Broadway to get away. As I struggled against them I recognised something in the smell of the debris and smoke.’ He watched as the towers crumbled to the ground, rumbling and engulfing the scattering crowds in a pall of smoke.[60] The pictures told the rest of the story. Bone maintained a tone of straight, factual reporting that could only be described as immensely professional. Having been almost caught out, The Times ended up having one of the best eyewitness reports of any newspaper.

Inevitably, graphic photographs dominated the paper. The Times, like most of its competitors, opted to dominate the front page with the image of the explosion at the moment of impact between plane and tower. On inside pages, Michael Binyon and Richard Beeston, the diplomatic editor, provided a profile of the immediate chief suspect, Osama bin Laden. News of the catastrophe and its implications appeared on pages one to six, augmented by a twenty-four-page special supplement with further comment and analysis provided in T2. There, Sandra Parsons and her team wrestled impressively with an even shorter deadline, helped by the extraordinary literary velocity of Giles Whittell who had just returned from his posting in Moscow. In the space of an afternoon, the entire newspaper was rewritten. Never in its history had The Times been forced to change and expand so much of its content in so little time.

Indeed, if a newspaper’s mettle is tested by its response in a moment of acute flux and crisis, The Times passed with honours. The tone remained calm, serious and devoid of hysteria or hyperbole. The leading article stretched the length of the page and avoided repetition, dim cliché or hot-headedness. It and its successor the following day called for the US to retaliate in a manner that would retain the world’s sympathy. It did not rule out an invasion of Afghanistan if attempts failed to persuade the Taleban to hand bin Laden over, but it suspected that ‘unless an attack killed bin Laden and the great majority of his followers, it could do more harm than good’. However distasteful Islamic fundamentalism might be, ‘religious revivalism does not in itself imperil others. The distinction must be drawn between fundamentalism and the Islamist extremists whose weapons include terror.’[61]

‘Good will prevail over evil’ ran the front-page headline for 13 September as horror gave way to resilience. Articles by Ehud Barak, Michael Portillo and the former presidential hopeful Gary Hart framed the Op-Ed page. As evocative as any sentiment was the Peter Brookes cartoon. It bore no comment, just a drawing of the world. It was upside down. Over the following days, The Times continued to provide strong and comprehensive coverage, with text on the news pages interspersed with short ‘brief lives’ of those mostly unknown but to their friends, family and God. Their hopes and aspirations were listed. One story after another spoke understatedly of the decency and quiet heroism of ordinary people.

On 14 September, President Bush declared a war on terror. Bin Laden was the prime suspect and the first target. So began the period of diplomatic and military build-up that was to create a new special relationship between Bush and Blair. Philip Webster travelled more than forty thousand miles with the Prime Minister on his trans-global mission in the month following the attacks. Attention switched to the best means of prosecuting this new kind of war. In 1998, President Clinton had responded to the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam embassy attacks by launching cruise missiles against supposed al-Qaeda bases in Sudan. These had clearly proved not much of a deterrent. Yet, given the Soviet army’s experience in Afghanistan, invading the mountainous and unforgiving country to flush bin Laden out of his base was a potentially costly and perhaps disastrous option. Against this drawback had to be weighed the risk to the world’s only superpower being seen as too impotent even to prevent a third-world theocracy from entertaining the most wanted criminal on the planet. For The Times’s leader writers this was a crucial point and consequently there was unanimity among them that the war on terror would have to be prosecuted even if it meant a ground invasion of Afghanistan. The counterblast was provided by Simon Jenkins. The prospect of waging a war on terror disheartened him. It is a ‘small wonder’, he wrote, ‘that Mr Bush and Mr Blair react by declaring a Hundred Years’ War on an abstract noun’.[62] Writing within hours of the 9/11 attacks for the following day’s paper, he expressed his outrage as strongly as every other journalist at the mass murder by the terrorists but questioned the wisdom of retaliation. Throughout his period as one of The Times’s foremost columnists, he had preached the doctrine of avoiding military engagement in conflicts for which there was no clear viable solution. He was not going to change his mind now. ‘To react to an atrocity by abandoning the customary self-control of democracy is to help the terrorist to do his work,’ he maintained. For all its barbarity, al-Qaeda’s attack on America ‘does not tilt the balance of world power one inch. It is not an act of war … Maturity lies in learning to live, and sometimes die, with the madmen.’[63]

The Times, however, like the Pentagon and the MoD, was soon preparing for war. At the very least, this involved removing the Taleban from power and, if possible, trapping bin Laden and his supporters there before they could flee. The campaign would not only be expensive for its prosecutors but also for newspapers which were struggling to cope with the budget-shrinking effects of the deepening recession in the advertising market. As Stothard recognized, The Times had no option but to provide comprehensive coverage regardless of the cost. Citing the tenacity of those fighting for their faith, the difficulty of the terrain and the grim experience of successive invaders, including the Russians, there was no shortage of experts prophesying disaster. Yet none of the critics satisfied The Times’s leader writers that there was an alternative means of ridding Afghanistan of the Taleban and their notorious guest.

It quickly became clear that the war’s critical experts had misunderstood American tactics. Unlike the Russians, the Americans were not proposing a massed invasion with the intention of conquering the country themselves. Rather, their objective was ‘regime change’ in Kabul with the fighting on the ground carried out by the tribes of the Northern Alliance. Small detachments of British and American special forces would assist the Northern Alliance’s efforts and provide laser-targeting for what would be America’s major contribution – precision aerial bombing of Taleban and al-Qaeda positions. The critics’ point had been that the Soviets had got bogged down fighting a wily and formidable foe, the mujahidin, yet the Anglo-American plan was to enlist and bribe these very fighters to win for them. There were two potential pitfalls with this strategy. The tribes and rival warlords of the Northern Alliance had a history of mutual acrimony. Their internal hatreds were one of the reasons they had lost so much of the country to the Taleban in the first place. They had been fighting the Taleban for six years and during that time had suffered continuous reverses. The second problem was that, while they might be able to regain the initiative in their northern Tajik heartlands, it was assumed they would meet stern resistance from the Pashtun peoples of the south. The Pashtuns were far more supportive of the Taleban. The third problem was articulated by Simon Jenkins:

I hope the word ethical never again crosses the lips of a British government minister. Not in modern history can Britain have forged a public alliance with such unsavoury characters as Abdul Rashid Dostum, Abdul Malik, Ismail Khan, Mohammad Ustad Atta and other northerners, mostly financed by heroin. These men have given a new dimension to the word terror.[64]

On 7 October, American bombing commenced. Anthony Loyd reported from the Northern Alliance’s lines near Bagram airport, south of Kabul. He could not help thinking, ‘Their morale has improved immensely since their sudden promotion to incidental ally of a superpower.’[65] Janine di Giovanni was based at the Northern Alliance’s headquarters. Afghanistan appeared to be a landscape marked out by the landmarks of unending conflict. ‘At the foot of the hill, among the scattering of 100m tank shells and alongside the shadow of a giant T55 tank, are Greek ruins dating from the time of Alexander the Great, the leader of a Western military power that made its mark in Afghanistan 2,300 years ago,’ she wrote with more than a hint of foreboding. ‘Yesterday soldiers from the Northern Alliance took positions behind giant stone urns that once belonged to Queen Hairum to fight yet another battle in Afghanistan.’[66]

The defence editor, Michael Evans, provided expert military analysis. Times reporters who were on the receiving end had much to contend with. By early November, Loyd’s level of discomfort worsened under the onslaught of acute dysentery. Janine di Giovanni described how, after seventeen days in Afghanistan, the only bath available to her was a dust bath. ‘The tension here is not just getting the story,’ she admitted. ‘It is the fight for survival – finding a place to sleep, grabbing the first bowl of goat-tasting rice, finding a generator that works to charge your satellite phone.’ The dust swirled ‘into typhoon-like proportions, blinding you, getting in your equipment, making you constantly filthy and irritable.’ The result was a dose of bronchitis, a hacking cough and swollen glands. In this, at least, she was not alone. Surveying a foul-smelling shack where fellow reporters were taking refuge, she compared it to ‘a giant Victorian tuberculosis clinic’.[67]

Whatever the travails of the press corps, the war was going extraordinarily well for the Northern Alliance. By 9 November, it had captured the strategically important town of Mazar-i Sharif. The belief that the Taleban had solidly entrenched support in the country was shattered. They too were reliant on the intervention of foreigners to fight their battles. This became apparent to The Times journalist Ian Cobain who was reporting from the Alliance’s positions near Saregh. He watched while ‘two ageing T54 tanks trundled slowly up the side of the escarpment to join in the bombardment and fired round after round into the Taleban positions’. One of the tank commanders shouted with undisguised joy, ‘“These aren’t Afghans I’m killing, they’re all Chechens and Pakistanis.” In Russian, he added: “I’m having a wonderful afternoon.”’[68] On 13 November, the Northern Alliance reached the outskirts of Kabul and discovered the Taleban had abandoned their capital.

The success of the Northern Alliance confounded even the war’s greatest supporters. Indeed, the very speed of their advance worried those who believed a stronger Anglo-American military presence was urgently needed on the ground in order to ensure fair play. Although there were already special service units operating, the first British troops to arrive officially in Afghanistan were not flown in until 16 November. On his own preferred battleground of the Op-Ed page, Simon Jenkins countered that Kabul had been liberated many times and its sense of joy had never lasted long. ‘Afghanistan’s history says that this adventure will end in tears. In Kabul we must fight more than terrorism. We must fight history.’[69] Another principal columnist saw events very differently. ‘Sometimes war works,’ concluded Anatole Kaletsky as the news of the Taleban’s flight was digested. He could not resist a dig at all the experts who had insisted the campaign would be a disaster from the first payload being dropped. Ridding Afghanistan of a regime that created more refugees than Rwanda and the Congo combined was a positive good. What was more, the sight of the Taleban running away had destroyed the belief that Islamic fundamentalists were somehow invincible: ‘The sudden collapse of the Taleban has proved more clearly than ever that even Muslim fundamentalists are fundamentally human. They try to be on the winning side. They shun defeat. They respect power. They respond to military force and financial incentives. The defeat of the Taleban has shown to the entire Muslim world that the mullah’s vision of an ultra-orthodox Islamic Utopia is a catastrophic delusion.’[70]

There was something else gained by the decision to confront the Taleban: intelligence on al-Qaeda. Wondering through the newly liberated Kabul, Anthony Loyd asked to be directed to where the Arabs had lived. He was pointed towards four houses that had, it transpired, been at the centre of al-Qaeda’s operations. What the looters had left were the most valuable items – documents. The al-Qaeda operatives had left in a hurry. There was evidence that some documents had spilled onto the floor as they attempted to cart them away. An attempt to set fire to the remainder had fizzled out. There was a profusion of letters, military manuals and aircraft magazines. There were Canadian passport applications, notes on how to blow up bridges and how the air-conditioning systems of apartment blocks worked. There were details on how to manufacture the toxic biological agent, ricin. There were also notes on how to detonate a dirty bomb using TNT to compress plutonium into a critical mass in order to ensure a nuclear chain reaction and, ultimately, a thermonuclear reaction. ‘This was only what was left behind by frightened men escaping the advance of the Mujahidin,’ Loyd mused. ‘The sensitive material is still with them.’[71]

The war, meanwhile, moved south. A fierce fight took place at Kunduz where the surrounded Taleban made a forlorn stand. They took a pounding. Those that were left surrendered in late November. Kandahar fell, and the last pretence of Taleban rule with it, on 7 December. This war objective secured, the American forces could concentrate on eliminating al-Qaeda’s bases in the mountains around Tora Bora. Bin Laden and his closest associates were believed to be holed up there, somewhere in the underground complex of passageways and caves. Janine di Giovanni moved over to Tora Bora to observer operations, while the American air force began dropping 15,000-pound ‘daisy cutter’ bombs in an attempt to blast out the defenders. By 17 December, however, when the last caves were completely overrun, there was still no sign of bin Laden. Troops continued to comb the area until January, but the assumption was made that he had slipped into northern Pakistan. He would live to fight another day.

What remained unclear was whether the Taleban had been removed permanently from Afghanistan or whether it was merely lying low, waiting for its chance to return when the Americans became bored of the hassles of peacekeeping and departed. On his arrival in Kabul, Loyd had entered a barber shop and asked for a clean shave. ‘This may hurt a little, I’m afraid,’ replied the barber, flicking open a cut-throat razor. ‘Until today it’s been five years since I’ve done a clean shave.’ The Taleban’s prohibition of male beardlessness had been brutally enforced. Loyd discovered, though, that not many customers were rushing to exercise entirely their new freedom. Most wanted a trim rather than a clean shave. One barber explained why: ‘People here are not sure that the Taleban will not return.’[72]

Chaos in the future on the scale of that which had blighted the past was always going to offer the Taleban its best opportunity to make a comeback. The first signs, though, could not have been encouraging to them. In Kabul, Hamid Karzai became interim leader of a shattered nation. By 2004, he became the democratically elected President of Afghanistan. Bush and Blair had brought about regime change in Kabul. In the first months of 2002, the process had yet to come to Baghdad.

VI

The war on terror coincided with a collapse in the advertising market. Over the short space of a few months, the revenue pouring into The Times dried up. Like its rivals, the paper could not survive unsupported for a long period on the proceeds of its cover price alone. What was more, if this was to be rapidly hiked up to make good some of the sudden advertising shortfall, all the gains of the 1990s price war would be swiftly reversed. The downturn was particularly ill timed given the fresh expenses involved in covering the war on terror. Rightly, this was given priority, ensuring that other projects had to be curtailed. The most severe budget freeze was imposed since the drastic economies forced upon Simon Jenkins in 1990. Worryingly, the disintegration of the advertising market was not just a British phenomenon. It hit the United States, too, ensuring that the paper could not look to plug the gap from a fresh display of News Corp.’s financial indulgence. Given how quickly the brakes were slammed on, The Times managed to maintain a surprisingly unchanged face to its public.

Indeed, it was during this period that the structural problems created in 2000 by the change of formats were put right. To considerable relief, The Times was returned to a two section broadsheet format (one for news and comment, the other for business and sport) with T2 continuing to provide arts and features in an additional and distinctive daily tabloid booklet. Stothard’s illness had removed from the scene one of T2’s principal architects just at the moment it had been launched. It had taken considerable work by its editor, Sandra Parsons, to mould the tabloid section into an established and popular formula. Yet, by 2002, the task had been largely achieved. Meanwhile, the reintroduction of the business and sport broadsheet section had other implications. The configurations of the printing presses demanded that the two broadsheet sections had to be of equal pagination. Yet, with comment, obituaries and Court & Social all in the first section, this would have meant there was more business and sports reporting than pages of news. It was Ben Preston who devised the solution of shunting Op-Ed and the leader page to the end of the news section and moving obits and Court & Social to the new business and sport second section. There was a minor outcry among some traditional readers who believed that commemorating the passing of the great and the good and reporting the fate of Accrington Stanley made for uneasy bedfellows. But, on the whole, the decision was beneficial and offered traditional readers more, rather than less, of the ‘paper of record’ formula. In calling the new expanded section ‘The Register,’ a conscious nod was made to The Times’s original 1785 title, the Daily Universal Register, and the distinctive masthead heraldry that had accompanied the old name was also resurrected. Three pages for obituaries could now be provided, restoring to The Times a clear lead in column inches over its rivals in this area. A ‘Lives Remembered’ column was also expanded to allow those who had known the deceased to add their own reminiscences.

With ‘The Register’ launched, sport and business reunited and T2 beginning to assert itself, Stothard could claim to have presided over both innovation and restoration. The financial clouds created by the advertising recession were the immediate worry but it was unclear, in early 2002, how long the inclemency would prevail. In all other respects, the paper had every reason to be confident. The job done, it was a favourable moment for Stothard to step aside. His tenth anniversary in the chair – by far the longest of any Times editor under Murdoch’s ownership – was approaching and he intimated to the proprietor that he would not want to remain much beyond that date. Murdoch accepted Stothard’s decision. He had met the managing editor of the US edition of the FT, Australian Robert Thomson (who had saved Jonathan Mirsky’s life in Beijing in 1993) who was credited with transforming the paper’s increasing global appeal in its fight to challenge the supremacy of the Wall Street Journal. Believing that The Times had only a short opportunity to attract someone of Thomson’s calibre before a rival did so, Murdoch decided to act. When Thomson accepted, Stothard was informed that the succession was assured and that he could safely step down. It was the end of an era and an appropriate moment for this volume of the paper’s history to close. Great changes lay ahead, including the decision of the paper to scrap its broadsheet size in favour of a tabloid format it preferred to describe as ‘compact’. There would be other changes: more foreign correspondents were appointed (more, indeed, than at any time in The Times’s history) and the paper continued to expand its coverage in other areas as well. It is too early to write with detachment on these and other dramas that will, eventually, shape the opening chapters of a future volume of the history of The Times. On 21 February 2002, Peter Stothard announced he was stepping down to the full complement of his editorial staff assembled around him in the newsroom. He retired amid the sort of scenes of emotion and goodwill from his colleagues that few editors had come to expect, let alone experience. There was genuine pleasure when it was announced that, as the new editor of the Times Literary Supplement, he was not moving so far away after all. Colleagues had found much in him to admire personally. His dignified struggle with cancer and the manner of his recovery had naturally attracted respect. He had been a guiding presence at the paper for twenty years and an editor for almost ten of them. Yet, he had been more than just an emblem of continuity during years of change and strain. He had worked hard to expand The Times’s range and been rewarded with a doubling of its circulation. He had been fortunate in some respects as well. Charlie Wilson had been dogged by a rival, the Independent, that was closing fast on The Times’s heels. This threat quickly receded during Stothard’s editorship, in part because of the hirings made by his predecessor, Simon Jenkins, and by business decisions made by the Independent’s management. This was not the only good fortune. Unlike Harold Evans or Simon Jenkins, Stothard’s period in the chair had coincided with the parent company’s preparedness to invest heavily in the paper rather than cut its budget back. The price war had been a major factor in the paper’s upward ascent. Only when the cover price was raised significantly higher would it be clear how many readers had been truly hooked to its contents. However, in attracting a younger but affluent readership, the demographic trends were moving steadily in The Times’s favour and many media forecasters believed that Murdoch’s long cherished hope that it would supplant the Telegraph as the market leader still looked attainable in the longer term. Time would tell.

The paper had expanded its coverage in almost all directions. Sport had made large gains, as had features. Perhaps Stothard’s two most important appointments were William Rees-Mogg and Patience Wheatcroft. The return of Rees-Mogg as a columnist sent out a strong signal that, despite the changes being made, the paper had not lost touch with its traditions and fundamental decency. Wheatcroft began a quiet revolution on the business pages, bringing the FT under intensive challenge in the home market for the first time in two decades. Nonetheless, the successes of The Times during the Stothard years were down to many people of whom only a small number were familiar to the readership. Rosemary Righter had maintained the intellectual rigour of the anonymous leading articles without succumbing to the self-doubting prevarication that had occasionally made balanced debate appear a higher priority than reasoned argument. David Ruddock had been an able master of the backbench, producing night after night a newspaper that was sharp and unpredictable. Two successive deputy editors, John Bryant and Ben Preston, and managing editors, Peter Roberts and George Brock, had also been the hidden hands tailoring the garment to measure. From his chief revise editor’s desk, Tim Austin had quietly turned many a journalistic sow’s ear into a silk purse.

The paper had certainly not shirked from controversy and had not always escaped from the fray unbloodied. It campaigned against Greg Dyke becoming the BBC’s director-general. Dyke was appointed nevertheless. A lengthier campaign had been launched that questioned Michael Ashcroft’s suitability as Treasurer of the Conservative Party. Ashcroft too had survived. The long affair with the ‘natural party of government’ had been ended although the flirtation with the new claimant to that title appeared of uncertain duration and highly conditional. The great ideological battle over joining the euro was deferred, although, if the opinion polls were accurate, The Times’s opposition resonated with much of the population at large. Responding to the vacuum and new alarms created by the Cold War’s end, the paper endorsed military intervention in foreign wars.

Naturally there were those who maintained, as they and their great-grandfathers always had, that the paper was a pale shadow if its former self. Those who believed the cost charged for doubling the circulation was the vulgarization of the paper’s content claimed that this was the true legacy of Peter Stothard’s editorship. It is a contention that will be analysed in the concluding chapter. Among those who knew him personally, it was hard to equate the charge with the man. One of his favourite poems was New Year Letter, written by W. H. Auden in 1940 from the United States as he contemplated the coming fall of Europe. Mourning the lack of leadership, the poem professed the need for a ‘voice within the labyrinth of choice’. Providing the voice had been Stothard’s achievement in expanding The Times.

[*]Later renamed the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

DUMBING DOWN?

An Overview of the Paper’s Performance, 1981–2002

I

For whose benefit has all this effort been directed? Throughout the first twenty-one years in which The Times was owned by Rupert Murdoch, it was dogged by two particularly unrelenting criticisms. The first claim was that the paper dumbed down. In other words, it stepped back from its historic position as the journal of record by reducing the quantity and quality of its serious news analysis in favour of more populist, less political, material. The second criticism was related to this first line of attack. It is that, by dumbing down, The Times has ceased to be distinct from its competition. Instead of catering for a small but well-informed audience – a ‘ruling few’ – it is just another newspaper, appealing to the same market as the rest of the quality press. In this interpretation, gaining more readers has been at the expense of providing more elevated journalism.

In assessing the validity of these complaints it is perhaps best to start with the question of the paper’s audience. Part of the problem has always been in defining what a typical Times reader looked and behaved like. With whatever level of fairness, the other newspapers attracted recognizable stereotypes among their readers – the public sector employee, wearing his corduroy jacket and CND badge, who read the Guardian; the Tory-voting Labrador owner and WI volunteer who stood loyally by the Daily Telegraph. In contrast, The Times never stirred quite the same partisan passions. It appeared to see its own role as that of a moderating counsel to all those in positions of authority. A problem with this was that The Times’s supposed stereotype, a civil servant wandering purposefully down Whitehall in a bowler hat and striped trousers, was a sight that had not been seen in public since the early 1960s. At any rate, his descendants – if they had not switched to the FT – could hardly be sufficiently numerous to swell The Times’s circulation from 280,000 when Murdoch bought the paper in 1981 to nearly 700,000 in 2002. Indeed, Murdoch was hardly the newspaper owner to make courting the British Establishment his life’s ambition. He regarded with distaste the notion that the paper existed merely to entertain and inform the ‘ruling few’. Matthew Parris, who as a Times columnist throughout the 1990s received between twenty and a hundred letters a week from readers, was certainly of the view that there was nothing predictable about them. Some were wealthy but:

most strike me as neither rich nor poor, and a notable group are of above average education and below average income: young people and old (especially elderly ladies), who in material terms have quite a struggle and for whom an intelligent newspaper represents a vantage point from which to survey the world of ideas, research and the arts. Perhaps my correspondents are untypical, but I am struck by how unmaterialistic most who write to me are: life to them is about more than money.[1]

Throughout the twentieth century, such readers had been attracted to The Times, albeit in smaller numbers in total than were reading it by the end of the century. In his study of the paper during the late 1960s and 1970s John Grigg defined them as the ‘cultivated and idiosyncratic, but obscure, people’.[2] If the paper was attracting them in increasing quantities – as the raw evidence suggested – then, far from being a point of criticism, it was a positive sign. They may not have been the most commercially attractive stratum of society, but they were some of the most discerning people in the country.

In any case, such readers did not replace the ‘ruling few’ that were the historic core of The Times’s market. They supplemented them. During the years of the Major Government, a higher proportion of MPs still read The Times than any other paper.[3] When the smug advertising slogan ‘Top People Take The Times’ was first plastered across billboards in 1957, the ‘top people’ in question were those classified as social grade ‘A’. ‘A’ grade readers came from households where the chief income earner’s occupation could be categorized as higher managerial, administrative or professional. Bishops, board directors and senior managers of large companies with more than two hundred employees, established doctors and barristers and the highest officer ranks (colonel to field marshal) within the armed forces were all, for example, in this category. When Murdoch bought The Times, only 3 per cent of the population could be so described, yet more than a fifth of The Times’s readers were among them. Although nothing could dislodge the Telegraph’s sheer weight of numbers, The Times had the highest proportion of any broadsheet newspaper. By 2002, the percentage of Britons who were in the ‘A’ social grade still only comprised 3 per cent of the population. Yet The Times – while broadening its appeal to other social groups – remained the broadsheet newspaper with the highest proportion of ‘A’ grade readers. While the largest growth in new readers had come from the other social categories, the total number of ‘A’ grade readers had increased over the period from 186,000 to 273,000. The consequence of twenty-one years of Rupert Murdoch’s ownership was that more ‘top people’ were taking The Times than had ever done so before, even compared to when it had been owned by such gentleman proprietors as the Astor family. Indeed, their increasing numbers (up almost 47 per cent) between 1982 and 2002 was far more significant than the growing numbers of ‘A’ grade households in the country at large (whose numbers had risen 21 per cent).

What was especially noteworthy was that the number of these so-called ‘top’ readers contracted during the 1980s. The paper had twelve thousand fewer of them in 1992 than in 1982. The dramatic increase came thereafter. Thus the era of the ‘price war’ not only – as might be expected – attracted poorer or less loftily employed readers to The Times, but also increased in absolute terms the number of ‘top people’ readers attracted to it as well. Whether or not Peter Stothard dumbed down the paper’s content during the period of his editorship, the allegation that he dumbed down the readership cannot be sustained. To retain a higher social profile than the Financial Times, while simultaneously appealing to a far broader swathe of the public, was no small achievement.

The reality was thus different from the appearance. It was in this latter respect that the dumbing down allegation had superficial appeal. At a cosmetic level, The Times of 2002 certainly looked less high minded than it had done twenty or thirty years before. Where once the printed word had been crammed into every available inch of the page (as if wartime paper rationing was still in place), the newspaper belatedly evolved and adapted to the challenge of television by becoming more visually appealing and less cluttered in its appearance. Technological advance allowed for larger pictures (with better definition) and for colour printing. Some readers considered the latter a vulgarity when it first appeared in 1991 but, by any objective criteria, it was a significant step forward. Visually, the paper certainly had moved towards a format closer to that favoured by glossy magazines and tabloids. Headlines got bigger. Banner headlines were appropriate for stories of national importance or for a breaking crisis, but the overuse of large text smacked of sensationalism and devalued the journalistic coinage. Furthermore, large font sizes for headlines forced the subeditors to describe the article’s message in fewer words. Inevitably, this encouraged inexactitude and exaggeration. Perfectly well-balanced articles became controversial because of the prejudicial and inaccurate headline with which they were lumbered. Another dumbing-down trait was the use of puns in headlines. Although often entertaining, overuse undermined the gravity of the page – especially when more serious news items were cohabiting there.

It was not difficult to understand why many thought the paper was lowering its standards when the front page became the least decorously laid out part of the whole paper. Given how impenetrable the front page of Douglas-Home’s Times had been, this shift was not entirely for the worse. For those of an aesthetic disposition, though, one newcomer really did lower the neighbourhood’s tone. The placing of a puff strapline above (or periodically below) The Times masthead was intended to draw the attention of non-committed passers-by to interesting features buried in the pages within. That The Times’s rivals all adopted the same approach suggested they too saw the commercial necessity of selling their product’s internal wares more openly. At The Times, the process began in earnest in 1988 as a means of demonstrating the increasing variety of sections contained within the Saturday paper. With Peter Stothard’s arrival in the editor’s chair, the practice became a daily occurrence. What was more, the width of the puff band expanded and eventually its superimposed images began to burst beyond the strap boundaries. Suddenly, the elegant lettering of The Times masthead, with its Hanoverian coat of arms, was daily jostled by the raised arm of an ecstatic footballer or the bald head of a cartoon character. Like a famous department store taking lessons in shop-window display from an out-of-town supermarket, this did nothing for the dignity of the paper.

These were questions of style and, perhaps, taste. But what had become of the substance? Had The Times really reduced the quantity or quality of its content as its critics alleged? The popular perception, reinforced by media pundits like Stephen Glover, was that the greatest period of dumbing down occurred during Peter Stothard’s editorship when the paper’s circulation doubled. Not everyone believed gaining more readers was good for The Times’s mental health. This was the same ‘more will mean worse’ argument that had animated Kingsley Amis’s denunciation of expanding the number of universities and students in 1960 (a process that had subsequently grown the ‘quality’ newspaper market). At The Times, there was certainly more. The paper’s circulation had gone up not only by lowering the price hurdle for purchasers but also by expanding the coverage it provided. There were over four million column centimetres of journalism (excluding advertisements and inserts) in The Times during 1992. In 2002, the figure had jumped to nearly 6.7 million column centimetres. Thus, The Times of 2002 had over 2.5 million more column centimetres of journalistic material in the year Peter Stothard departed the editorship than when he took up the position.[4] This was a substantial increase. Home news had increased from 625,929 column centimetres in 1992 to 923,551 in 2002. European and world news had increased during the same period from 348,042 to 397,049. This was a less spectacular jump but nonetheless ran counter to the popular assertion that The Times had reduced its international coverage over the years. The business pages – hardly a ‘dumb’ section of the paper – had risen by more than 60 per cent. Sport had recorded an even more spectacular growth.

Soure: Author’s calculations based on data from Nielsen Media Research.[5]

The raw numbers, of course, did not tell the whole story. The issue was not just one of quantity but of quality. The space devoted to home news doubled over the decade but some of this increase was accounted for not by more intensive political or investigative journalism but by an increasing predilection for ‘human interest’ stories. These might range from salacious disclosures in the High Court involving some private tragedy or a celebrity divorce to the sort of ‘fancy that?’ style of story that could be summed up in the headline ‘Long day for Santas but that’s ho ho ho business’.[6] The number of stories involving animals showed a marked rise. This development was put down by some to Stothard’s interest in wildlife. The tone of these animal and human interest articles was often whimsical and they shed a light on some aspect of British eccentricity that might otherwise have gone unrecorded. Occasionally, the focus looked more prurient. Personal tragedies tended to make for better stories if accompanied by a picture of the dead/missing/pregnant teenager. The photograph was larger if the victim was pretty or middle class. When critics derided the journalistic quality of The Times, it was often this sort of reporting they had in mind. Against such observations, two points need to be made. First, such articles were usually supplementing, rather than replacing, the more traditional news items. Second, the idea that The Times’s role was to report the machinations of the powerful and influential but to ignore stories about ordinary people living and working beyond the metropolitan elite, suggested a rather narrow interest in the world in all its variety and diversity. The paper was there to appeal to and reflect a large community, not behave as if its constituency was a nineteenth-century rotten borough.

It was possible to exaggerate the extent to which ‘human interest’ stories were taking a hold of the paper, although the impression was helped by the increasing likelihood of their being placed in the front few pages of the main section rather than further back. A reader trying to locate Peter Riddell’s political commentary had first to flick through several pages in which the small type of the news articles made less visual impact than the outsize photographs of the actress Kate Winslet smiling from a red carpet or the entertainer Michael Barrymore looking troubled. This did give the impression that the paper had a populist sense of priorities. It was certainly a change from The Times of former decades. The front news pages of the 1970s and early 1980s contained tightly packed political stories. Yet, on closer inspection, a significant proportion of the political news in The Times of that period was the work of the labour desk. Edition after edition was packed with news of strikes, industrial problems and successive governments’ attempts to intervene in them. These stories became a casualty not of an editorial decision but of their increasing infrequency once the Thatcher reforms began to have their effect on changing the climate of Britain’s industrial relations and depoliticizing the disputes that remained. Consequently, the work of successive industrial correspondents, Edward Townsend and Ross Tieman, and industrial editors, Derek Harris, Philip Bassett and Christine Buckley, increasingly appeared not in the news pages but in the business section.

Much of the shift of industrial/political stories from news to business happened during the 1980s. A different rebalancing of power was responsible for the reduction of other political news stories in the 1990s. In the home news section of the paper, the coverage of British politics and Parliament halved between 1992 and 2002. In drawing comparisons, it should be remembered that 1992, unlike 2002, was a general election year. However, by 1992 Simon Jenkins’s decision to terminate the parliamentary page had already been made. Saving money was not the only reason behind his decision to do away with the paper’s attempt to provide readers with a potted version of Hansard. Reporting the legislature’s debates made sense in the past but its relevance had ebbed as far as contemporary politics was concerned. Britain was increasingly governed not from the chambers of the Houses of Parliament but – as Jenkins well comprehended – from Downing Street, Whitehall, a multitude of quangoes and through EU directives and regulations emanating from Brussels. From a journalistic perspective, this created problems: these other governmental organizations were not as transparent as the Palace of Westminster and publishing on-the-record information was more difficult. This did have a deleterious effect on the comprehensiveness of political reporting.

By 2002, The Times had five journalists lurking around Westminster’s precincts where twenty years earlier it employed twelve just to report the Commons debates for the Parliament page. Nonetheless, when parliamentary politics most mattered, such as on key Commons divisions or in political crises, The Times’s coverage was as comprehensive as it had ever been. Nobody reading it during Peter Stothard’s tenure could have complained there was insufficient coverage of the European debate. The reporting and analysis of Budget statements became increasingly detailed. Peter Riddell had as good a feel for the business of government as any of the paper’s past political editors. Indeed, on closer inspection the supposed past ‘golden age’ tarnished easily. In terms of general election coverage, The Times had improved remarkably over the last half-century. In the run-up to the 1951 general election, The Times offered only one page a day (it was then only a twelve-page paper) of reports on the coming election. A week before polling day in February 1974, it had expanded sufficiently to provide election reports on the front page and on one and a half pages inside, supplemented with Op-Ed and leader page comment (out of a total paper of twenty-eight-pages). By comparison, during the 1997 general election campaign, the fifty-six-page Times was regularly committing eight pages of coverage every day in addition to a level of in-depth scrutiny, outside specialists’ analysis and interviews that was simply unimaginable a quarter of, let alone half, a century before.

Nor was the reporting of general elections a rare aberration against the trend. The average Times edition of 1951 only devoted half a page to home news and two-thirds of a page to foreign news. The business section ran to three columns. Far from being the repository of fine writing, most of the content was short ‘news in brief’-style articles for which the source was usually information provided by wire services and official announcements. Analysis was largely restricted to the anonymous proclamations of the leading articles. By 1974, The Times was moving much closer to the paper of 2002 in its approach to news gathering and content. Yet, even allowing for a format that crammed more words onto the page (and was consequently harder to read), its offering was much more narrowly focused than what was made available by the paper edited by Peter Stothard.

Much of The Times’s historic reputation had been built on the strength of its foreign reporting. It was, after all, the paper of William Howard Russell, Henri de Blowitz and Louis Heren. During the 1980s and 1990s the main allegation against the overseas reporting was less that it had dumbing down by introducing too many human interest stories so much as that it had simply lost its authority. Such a charge was, necessarily, a matter of opinion and, with hindsight, it was not clear what was so impressive about a paper’s past judgment that backed appeasing Hitler in the 1930s and Stalin in the 1940s. Naturally, there were those who believed appeasing Israel and taking a tough line on the Arab states were mistaken opinions adopted by the modern paper although the foreign desk received far more – often abusive – calls from readers who were convinced the paper was too critical of successive Israeli governments. All the paper could do was assess the situation to the best of its ability and, having taken every effort to establish the facts, stand by what it reported.

In the areas where the paper’s foreign coverage could be quantified, there was no question that it had improved since its acquisition by News International. The paper’s foreign news coverage took up more space in the first years of the twenty-first century than at any period in its history. It also had more foreign correspondents reporting from around the globe than at any previous time. Even after taking account of inflation and other increments, the resources the company ploughed into foreign news reporting dwarfed what had been invested in previous decades. Such was the financial squeeze pursued by the Thomson management that when one of the paper’s most experienced foreign correspondents, David Watts, joined The Times in 1974, he discovered that the foreign desk staff were forbidden from making international telephone calls, even when in direct pursuit of a story. Instead, they had to wait for a possible informant to call them. A paper riding on its reputation for foreign coverage was temporarily reduced to a policy that could only be described as ‘call us, we won’t call you’. Unsurprisingly, in Watts’s opinion, the quality of the paper’s foreign journalism had improved immeasurably over the succeeding thirty years.[7]

When The Times had been understaffed and underresourced during the Astor and Thomson proprietorships, great reliance had been placed on the reports arriving from the news agency wire services. The result was that, on almost any given day, the paper carried brief news reports from a wide variety of different countries. Details even of a relatively minor change in the Sudanese cabinet might appear. This gave the impression of a paper devoted to publishing the detailed business of government from countries large and small. Peregrine Worsthorne once lovingly recalled that as a trainee foreign sub at The Times in the late 1940s he had been given a dressing down for failing to spot a minor mistake in the published list of the Sudanese government’s new members – the junior minister of posts’ name had been inaccurately rendered from the Arabic. To Worsthorne, this episode demonstrated how much a paper that once prided itself on its accuracy had subsequently lowered its standards. Yet the incident also highlights the extent to which The Times’s foreign reporting often comprised little more than copying verbatim (with or without mistakes) an official press release. In what respect was this insightful journalism? The Times of the 1990s certainly contained fewer references to the intricacies of the Khartoum regime’s musical chairs and, in this sense, the paper could be accused of being less of an international journal of record. But those who really needed to know the identity of the current junior minister responsible for Sudan’s postal service could far more easily contact its embassy or find it out through an internet search rather than hope it might be listed somewhere in The Times that day. The notion that the paper’s primary role in the 1990s should still have been – as Worsthorne comprehended it half a century earlier – to provide the ‘essential information needed by the then governing and administrative classes to carry out their official duties’ was one that technology had comprehensively superseded.

In fact, the unvarnished statements that comprised so much of The Times’s international coverage in the 1940s and 1950s had not been entirely abolished fifty years later. The old agency wire-based tradition continued in the ‘news in brief’ columns running down the margins of the page and this left most of the expanse of paper for much longer and more perceptive articles than had been the vogue in the past. Such changes called upon the expertise of far more reporters filing from the countries they were actually writing about (and using knowledgeable local stringers where necessary). David Watts’s understanding of the complexity of the Asia-Pacific countries, Roger Boyes’s reports from central and Eastern Europe, Richard Owen in Rome and Charles Bremner in Paris all combined to provide a deep knowledge of their adopted countries with a fluid and engaging writing style. This was something The Times of previous generations often lacked. Indeed, as Worsthorne pointed out, ‘the most important qualification for being a journalist when I began fifty years ago was not an ability to write’. Such was The Times’s aversion to analysis rather than the straight repetition of published information that ‘intellectuals, therefore, were frowned upon as well as writers’.[8] In retrospect, foreign reporting in The Times has become a far more sophisticated profession. Aside from covering political developments, correspondents have also been given the space to paint in their articles a ‘slice of life’ from the countries and cultures that are their speciality. Such insights were rarely accorded to Times readers back in the ‘golden age’. Where the focus remains narrowly political, innovations like Bronwen Maddox’s daily ‘Foreign Editor’s Briefing’, instituted in 2001, greatly enhanced the paper’s breadth of international analysis. Anyone interested in comparing The Times then and now need only look at its coverage of the signing on 25 March 1957 of the Treaty of Rome, which, in creating the EEC, was one of the most important political developments of the twentieth century. The event was accorded one news item, on column six of the foreign news page (page eight), under the headline ‘Further steps in uniting Europe’. There was no picture (the photograph used that day was of voters going to the polls in Belize) and, in order of priorities, it was accorded the fifth most important priority status on that day’s page. About half of its 350-word commentary was taken up listing the names of the signatories and describing the décor of the hall in which the agreement was reached. No unaware reader would have understood why the German Chancellor was prophesying it to be ‘a historic date in European affairs’.[9] Nor would the reader have been any the wiser seeking elucidation in other pages of the paper. The leading article that day decided the passage of the Shops Bill in the House of Lords was more worthy of its attention. Indeed, apart from one brief article on 11 March and a reprinting – without comment or analysis of any kind – of the basic provisions in the agreement on 20 March, The Times failed utterly in the months either side of the Treaty’s signing to bother with the story of the EEC’s creation even although it was clearly regarded on the Continent as a development of the utmost significance. Judged by such slipshod standards, it is the foreign coverage of the pre-Murdoch Times that appears surprisingly dumbed down.

A year after News International’s purchase, the fortunes of the paper’s business section had fallen markedly. For the next fifteen years, successive business editors were unable to regain the level of coverage that The Times business news had provided in the 1970s. This was a period of sudden but long-lasting decline. Indeed, the notion that the paper was a serious rival to the Financial Times could not be sustained. The Times had neither the range nor the depth. By the late 1990s, however, it was clawing ground back fast. This was partly a response to investment but also a mood of optimism and professionalism that prevailed following Stothard’s appointment of Patience Wheatcroft as business editor. The improvement was rewarded in the readership statistics. One serious survey in March 2002 suggested that The Times was leading the way with business readers classified in the A-B social grades with 274,000 business readers as compared to 239,000 for the FT and 235,000 for the Daily Telegraph.[10]

In the areas of home, foreign, business and sports news, direct comparisons can be attempted between what The Times was providing at different stages of its development. Much of the dumbing down debate, however, involves subject matter that was given far less priority prior to 1981. This was a response to interconnected social, economic and cultural changes. The consumer choices available in the free-market sector of 1990s Britain far exceeded the more limited (and even State-rationed) choice of the post-war high street. This was not just a matter of supermarkets offering ten different varieties of stuffed olive where once there had been none. The number of books published had soared. Deregulation policies and advances in cable, satellite and digital technology broadened the television, radio, computer and internet options in homes across the country. Knowledge and appreciation of wine was no longer confined to the privileged or to aficionados. The quality of restaurants and interest in cooking grew exponentially. Cheaper air travel and the growth of the tourist industry brought travel to exotic or luxurious locations within the budget of young people where once it had been the preserve of the rich or reckless. A profusion of unit trusts and investment options was on offer to those with even relatively modest savings. The Times would have been involved not only in commercial suicide but also in a dereliction of duty if it had not broadened its coverage in all these areas. But for those who regarded any journalism not engaged in the reporting of serious news as a dumbing down exercise, there was much to condemn in the resulting proliferation of pages and supplements that guided Times readers through the bewildering array of consumer choices. Doubtless some who wanted to keep the pleasures of Positano to themselves shivered at the thought of a newspaper article directing hordes of new Times readers to the delights of the Amalfi coast. On this logic, the more information the paper provided, the less exclusive it became.

The Times in the post-war period had not disdainfully turned its back on consumerism. It happily printed small estate agent advertisements for houses in Surrey, garage salesrooms, stockbroking firms or holiday offers of bed and board in Torquay. This was not considered to be pandering to tawdry tastes. Yet, when the paper expanded the column inches it gave to seriously discussing the property market, assessing the performance of a new range of cars or pension plans, or reporting from an exotic holiday location, so arose the accusations of going downmarket and indulging in the worst excesses of ‘lifestyle’ journalism. This was particularly galling considering how knowledgeable and refined in taste were so many of the journalists involved. The restaurant critic, Jonathan Meades, went in search of high standards of cuisine, not fast food. The wine critic, Jane MacQuitty, did not overindulge on supermarket plonk. Anne Ashworth did not cater, primarily, for those with a poor credit rating.

Saturdays became the day in which most of these ‘lifestyle’ articles appeared. As the 1990s commenced, the increasing availability of colour printing meant that magazine supplements could be produced that rivalled what had once been the virtual monopoly of the Sunday Times whose colour magazine had famously revolutionized weekend journalism back in 1962. Bigger and glossier, The Times on Saturday mimicked many of the attributes that had made the Sunday Times the country’s market leader. Some readers, indeed, appeared to be under the misconception that the Sunday Times was The Times on Sunday although The Times never quite found the formula to attract the scale of readership amassed by the other News International-owned broadsheet. Nonetheless, by the early 1990s, The Times was among the broadsheets whose combined Saturday market had surged 18 per cent higher than their weekday sales. In February 1997, the Saturday broadsheet market finally overtook the Sunday market. The Times played its part in this process. By 1995, it was selling almost a fifth more copies than during weekdays. It had long been a tough assignment for one man to edit a six-day newspaper, especially when, by the mid-nineties, the Saturday paper had expanded to eight sections. Consequently, the Saturday paper had its own editor and in the latter half of the decade Nicholas Wapshott directed the operation. Wapshott had joined The Times in 1976 and, after a spell as the Observer’s political editor, had taken charge of the new-look Saturday Times Magazine in 1992. Under his command, the Saturday paper continued to broaden its range. Not all the accusations of dumbing down were mistaken. In the main news section, there was, on average, less hard political news. This was partly a response to what was considered to be the different demands of the weekend readership. It was also a reflection of the minimal parliamentary and political business conducted on Fridays. The colourful and breezy style of Play, an arts and entertainment magazine started in September 2000, did not suit lengthy or serious review articles. At the same time, cost-cutting measures in the wake of the collapse of the advertising market diminished what could be offered elsewhere in the paper and many readers found themselves denied the sort of serious literary and artistic review section that rival newspapers were offering on Saturdays. It was a deficiency put right when, in 2004, Play’s stop button was pressed and the more upmarket Weekend Review launched.

The Times on Saturdays was much more successful at attracting women readers than during the week. When Robert Thomson succeeded Peter Stothard, the paper’s male-to-female readership ratio was still around 60:40 but on Saturdays it was heading towards sexual equality. In particular, the glossy full-colour Times Magazine proved the right medium for fashion and beauty photography and journalism. During the week, the paper had long attempted – not always successfully – to entice more female readers by producing feature pages perceived to be of interest to them. Like The Times, the Daily Mail had made enormous circulation gains in the second half of the 1990s and this achievement was, in part, attributed to the strenuous efforts it had made to appeal to female readers. There were lessons to be learned from this and, with Sandra Parsons in charge, The Times’s new features T2 tabloid section was started in 2000 amid hopes of similar success. It got off to an uncertain start but by the time the whole paper had followed it down a tabloid path, it was competing favourably with the opposition. In an age when instant news was available from so many other media providers, Parsons’s pages were a principal reason for customers continuing to pay the cover price for The Times. They helped give the paper its distinctive flavour. Features were no longer an afterthought. They had become an essential ingredient.

To those of a certain age and sex, the dumbing down and the feminization of The Times were one and the same. Female-orientated features were often of the ‘human interest’ variety and might involve ruminations on such intangible and abstract subject matter as emotions and relationships rather than hard facts and world politics. Whether putting a picture of a pretty actress on the front page appealed more to male or female readers was a moot point. At any rate, as Peter Stothard once reminded Jonathan Mirsky when he complained about the pro-glamour picture priority, the boost in sales generated by having a famous catwalk model smiling out from the front page was what helped to pay the expense of keeping the eminent China scholar as the paper’s correspondent in Hong Kong.[11] A newspaper that daily repeated the same images of pensive politicians entering and leaving front doors might also be accused of failing to provide a balanced view of the state of mankind. The Times could certainly be accused of getting the balance wrong and the increasing use of page three for ‘soft news’ stories ahead of more solemn events was a case in point. Likewise, some argued (not altogether convincingly) that there was a place for reports from Paris Fashion Week, but it was not in the main news section of the paper. These were not new developments, however. Before Rupert Murdoch bought The Times, page three had not been the place for hard news but for full-page advertisements and fashion spreads appeared cheek by jowl with overseas news. Indeed, some of the old paper’s layout priorities were far less explicable than the blurring of hard and soft news in the 1990s. Sport used to appear in the middle of the paper. Thus, the earnest reader had to flick past several pages devoted to ballgames before reaching the leading articles and weightier analysis. It was not until 1981, when Harold Evans sensibly reordered the contents, that the action from Anfield and Aintree was moved to the back pages.

The extent to which The Times was ‘feminized’ during the 1990s could be hotly contested. Covering everything from militant feminism (which was poorly catered for) to pedicure and manicure advice, the term was as imprecise as an observation that the paper in the 1930s was heavily masculine. Back in that period, the business pages were almost inescapably written by men for men. By 2002, society’s stratification was less clearly delineated. There was no longer anything especially male orientated about a company report. Instead, a more worthwhile judgment on how The Times had become less male orientated can be made not so much by categorizing the content as by those who produced and commissioned it. In 1981, women represented a small minority of The Times’s complement of senior journalists. Some of them had built high reputations, like Geraldine Norman, who was fearless in exposing corruption and poor practice in the salesroom world. They were at the helm, though, of only three principal departments – fashion, features and Court & Social. By 2002, the position was transformed. The business pages were edited by Patience Wheatcroft, T2 was edited by Sandra Parsons, Bronwen Maddox was foreign editor, Anne Ashworth edited the money section, Rosemary Righter was bowing out after many years as chief leader writer, Erica Wagner was literary editor, Cath Urquhart was travel editor, Lisa Armstrong presided over fashion and Brigid Callaghan edited the internet edition, Times Online. Alice Miles and Mary Ann Sieghart influenced the paper’s politics and, alongside Libby Purves, were regular columnists. For the most part, this blow for equality made little difference to the finished product: there was nothing definitively feminine about a Wheatcroft business page or the thunder rumbling from a Righter leading article.

Indeed, if articles could be easily divided according to their gender appeal, the 1990s was also the decade in which sports coverage – which had a far higher male readership – increased by more than 70 per cent. Even this statistic needed qualification. During the decade, the paper turned increasingly to women sports journalists, several of whom became major columnists. Nonetheless, most of the sporting subject matter retained an overwhelmingly male following. Richard Williams believed ‘the single most noticeable factor’ in the history of broadsheet newspapers over the past twenty years was the growth of their sports coverage.[12] Football saw the biggest growth with The Times following in the wake of its proprietor’s identification of soccer coverage as a lucrative growth market. Besides the daily reports, a popular development commenced in 2000 with the publication of monthly football handbooks to accompany the league season. These were soon supplemented with similar productions for rugby union’s Six Nations championship, the Ashes and Formula One. There was hardly a sport whose coverage was not substantially improved by the end of the century when compared to ten, let alone twenty, years earlier. In 1984, The Times’s coverage of the Los Angeles Olympics rarely exceeded one page a day. By the time of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, there was, on top of all the usual number of sports pages, a daily twelve-page supplement of Olympic reports. For the many Times readers who had no interest in sport, this expansion looked excessive. This was not, in itself, a reason for cutting back. After all, a large proportion of readers had no interest in what was contained within the business section, although this was hardly an argument for restricting its development. The notion that the expanding coverage accorded to sport was a sign of the paper dumbing down was difficult to sustain, given that the growth of the second section was not at the expense of the main news and comment section. Only when sport intruded into the main section for no better reason than that its practitioners had become well-known celebrities could the charge be made that the overall effect was not an improvement in the depth and reach of the newspaper.

II

A history of The Times in the last years of the twentieth century naturally seeks to discern the principal changes and developments. However, the paper’s continuing appeal has not been determined purely by its zeal for experimentation. The great trend of the Murdoch years has not so much been The Times’s dumbing down or wising up, but rather the enduring strength of old staples. In this respect, the letters and obituary pages lead the field. Even those who believed The Times had lost its former authority continued to hold its letters page in esteem. Its autonomous spirit, not least as a forum for dissent against the paper’s editorial line, was what Roy Jenkins assured Peter Stothard ‘has led some of us to remain faithful to The Times even when less enthusiastic about other aspects of the paper’.[13]

The irony was that the most famous page in The Times was the one not actually written by its journalists. It was the task of Leon Pilpel in the 1980s and Ivan Barnes in the 1990s to sift through 250 to 300 letters a day (and between 60,000 to 70,000 a year) in order to find the sixteen or so that would make it into the newspaper. Periodically, the letters’ editor would be deluged. Barnes had to struggle with a thousand letters a day arriving on his desk during the Gulf War. Improvements in communications technology also increased the volume of literary traffic. The first letter sent by email was published in 1997 and by 2002 the volume of emails necessitated a new secondary ‘debate’ section where they could be published in ‘The Register’. Three assistants and three secretaries provided the letters’ editor with help and every missive, no matter how barmy, received an acknowledgement. Pilpel would arrive early and read through the entire first post before his assistants arrived, putting to one side those he thought had potential. He had a straightforward criterion for acceptance: ‘It should reflect the intelligent after-dinner conversation that you would expect to find among educated folk,’ adding ‘with the occasional off-beat subject thrown in.’ Over the decades, while the art of letter writing declined in Britain, the proportion of those suitable for publication in The Times remained constant. Pilpel considered that of an average daily postbag, about 8 per cent were usually publishable.[14]

Pilpel was a former Guards officer and graduate of Trinity College Dublin who had joined The Times in 1953 as a subeditor on the home news desk before taking over responsibility for the letters page in 1980. As Brian MacArthur put it, he may have been a largely anonymous journalist to the reading public but he had the power to ‘gainsay the mighty or uplift the unknown, start or end national controversies, or solve some of the diverting mysteries and riddles of British life such as why so few ingredients of British salads are grown in Britain’. His subediting skills were important since many letters benefited from being cut down to size. Unlike the Daily Telegraph and the Independent, The Times did not solicit letters, a practice Pilpel regarded as ‘bogus’.[15] Exclusivity was also a prerequisite. No letter would be published that was being simultaneously offered to another newspaper. Occasionally, Pilpel would spot a letter he had rejected for publication appearing a few days later in the Telegraph. Letters containing personal abuse or vicious invective were also not considered for publication nor were those making specific charges against the royal family since royalty, by convention, could not reply. There were, of course, ways of getting round restrictions. In July 1986 the Sunday Times published allegations that a rift had developed between the Queen and Margaret Thatcher. At contention was supposedly the Queen’s fear that her Prime Minister’s opposition to sanctions against South Africa risked breaking up the Commonwealth. The Queen was also said to be at odds with the more strident aspects of Thatcherism’s domestic agenda. Predictably, an almighty row ensued. The principal source for the allegations was Michael Shea, the Queen’s press secretary. His defensive assertion that his observations had been misconstrued led two of Times Newspapers’ directors – Lords Drogheda and Dacre – to join the calls for Andrew Neil, the editor of the Sunday Times, to be sacked. Buckingham Palace took the unusual step of rebutting the Sunday Times’s claims in the letters page of The Times. William Heseltine, the Queen’s private secretary (it was assumed with her approval), wrote at length, making clear that it was ‘preposterous to suggest that any member of the Queen’s Household, even supposing that he or she knew what her Majesty’s opinions on Government policy might be (and the Press Secretary certainly does not), would reveal them to the Press.’ The next day, Neil replied at even greater length, denying that the article had gone beyond what Shea had originally intimated. The damage had been done, Neil asserted, because individuals at the Palace ‘were playing with fire and did not have the wit to blow it out before it burned them’.[16] Shea stepped down from his post the following year. Neil lasted another seven.

Despite its designation, the famous 1981 letter from 364 economists denouncing Mrs Thatcher’s monetarist polices was, in fact, never published on the letters page. Its contents appeared in articles on the news and business pages instead. This was an exception. Topicality dictated that some letters had to be used immediately in the next day’s edition. Others were held back while a larger correspondence accumulated so that the best could then be grouped together to create a debate. There was never any danger of a shortage although a section heading, ‘Enigma of the Liberal Vote’, remained for many years on standby to cover all eventualities. Recurring themes over the years represented the preoccupations of many Times readers – cuts in university and research funding, student debt, the state of Britain’s railways and her relations with her European partners. There was also the phenomenon of the recurring letter writer. One of these was Vice-Admiral Louis le Bailly whose contributions on an impressive breadth of interests frequently found their way onto the page. Another was Henry Button – a particular mine of information on Oxbridge ephemera. The publication of an academic league table would almost invariably bring forth another Button missive establishing different criteria such as Cambridge’s propensity to have more of its chancellors executed than Oxford’s (the margin, apparently, was seven to one) or that William Henry Waddington, who rowed for Cambridge in the 1848 Boat Race, was Prime Minister of France from February to December in 1879.[17] Errors in the newspaper provided opportunities for the sharp-eyed, the knowledgeable and the pedant. Articles that claimed something was the ‘first’ or someone the ‘oldest’ all but incited letters that pointed out earlier and older examples. For those interested in the arcana of knowledge, The Times letters’ page provided essential reading matter. There was, for example, a lengthy correspondence on the development and demise of the water-powered organ.[18] A 1981 Diary column about the forthcoming final reunion of veterans of the Boer War led to a particularly sprightly letter from a Mr A. D. Bowers, born in 1882, who announced he was the only veteran who fought ‘practically naked, butt end and bayonet’ in the last major engagement of the war, the Battle of Tweefontein. ‘I have been to most of the reunions since 1901,’ he added helpfully.[19] Replying to a leading article decrying the decline of classical language teaching in schools, Frances Morrell, the leader of the Inner London Education Authority, submitted a three-paragraph letter in Latin. It duly appeared as sent. With a little help from the resident classicist, Philip Howard, The Times was able to provide an explanation for non-comprehending readers on the home news pages. At any rate, ‘Carolo Wilsoni salutem’ provided a welcome change to that usually proffered to the editor.[20]

There was an established tradition of the short, whimsical letter. These often generated surprisingly large postbags in turn. Readers continued to write to announce they had heard the first cuckoo of spring even though The Times had stopped publishing anything on this subject in 1953. When Miles Kington mused on the fictional characters suggested by village names, the paper was inundated with suggestions. One correspondent wrote in to say that there was a signpost in the Lincolnshire Wolds that stated, ‘To Mavis Enderby & Old Bolingbroke’, to which someone had added ‘– a son’.[21] Yet, the extent of the place names correspondence was modest compared to that which followed a personal appeal from the Rector of Bartonle-Cley. He had recently acquired a new horse and asked readers to propose for it a suitable name that would act as an alibi for when the bishop wished to see him. Two hundred and fifty suggestions came in. One letter suggested the excuse, ‘I’m afraid the Rector is unable to see you – he’s just fallen from Grace.’ In the end, he played safe, and settled for being away on ‘Sabbatical’.[22]

The letters page could be both thoughtful and whimsical but the question of whether it retained its former importance invariably cropped up. In 1968, J. W. Wober published an analysis of it in New Society. His thesis, rather grandiloquently phrased, was that the page ‘shared something with the real or mythical forum and agora of ancient cities in which both rulers and ruled spoke their minds’ and that while in Parliament, politicians spoke directly to themselves and their colleagues, in the letters pages of The Times, politicians, experts and electors all spoke together. By analysing letters written during a single month for each year between 1953 and 1967, Wober demonstrated that slightly more than a third had been written by members of the elite (which he classified as senior figures in Church, State, the professions etc.,). It was not unreasonable to assume that since the period of Wober’s study the importance of having a letter published in The Times had diminished. During these years other information and comment disseminating media had proliferated, from radio phone-ins to television discussion programmes and internet chatrooms. In 2004, Wober undertook a new statistical analysis that brought his examination of the paper up to date. He discovered that almost 37 per cent of published letter writers were still representatives of elite groups – a proportion that was almost exactly the same as before. Top people still wrote to The Times. Indeed, there had been a significant increase in letters from senior figures in education, the armed forces and the police. Despite the grumbles of those who disliked The Times’s editorial line, it was still less politically partisan than its competitors – the right-wing Telegraph, left-wing Guardian or increasingly left-leaning Independent. This helped to bolster its claims to be a national debating chamber. As a regular place of interaction between the powerful and the public, Wober suggested that its only real rival was BBC 1’s Question Time. The number of letter-writing MPs had fallen off but it had increasingly become a forum for the new quangocracy to raise issues with the wider public. In this respect, The Times had adapted well to the changing anatomy of British governance.[23]

The letters page was not the only healthy veteran. If there is an area in which British journalism has found dominion then it is in death. The quality and quantity of the daily obituary notices published by the four main broadsheet newspapers far outshines the scant efforts of the European press where only the most eminent are accorded special consideration. Even the great newspapers of the United States provide an obituary service whose quality is uneven compared to the daily monuments to past life erected from newspaper offices in London.

From its beginnings, The Times printed death notices and, periodically, tributes to the deceased. Nonetheless, it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that the term ‘obituary’ took hold and an editor to work systematically on them was not appointed until after the First World War. For the next sixty years The Times obituary reigned supreme as the foremost newspaper assessment of the departed. From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, this appears to have been yet another ‘golden age’ to have been in a somewhat lower carat than legend relates. World leaders were accorded excellent assessments – the obituaries of Hitler and Churchill still read well despite the passage of time – but the standard format for all lesser mortals was merely a two column section squeezed to the right of the Court & Social announcements. This level of coverage was better than any other newspaper provided at the time. Nonetheless, it was scanty compared to what was deemed appropriate by the 1990s.

The space limitations were only part of the problem. Nowhere did the tag of ‘paper of record’ hang more soberly than over the obituaries department where the perceived necessity of listing the details of a public servant’s career could get in the way of a lively anecdote or telling story. The extent to which Times obits moved away from prosaic recitations of the offices held by public servants and embraced non-Establishment figures marked the paper’s belated acknowledgment that it was more than the notice board of the policy-making class and that society had become a far broader entity. When Bob Marley, ‘the embodiment of reggae’, died in 1981 his brief obituary notice came fourth in the pecking order, behind Sir Anthony Milward, Judge William Openshaw and Arturo Jemolo, the commentator on Italian Church and State relations.[24] Indeed, the attempt to give more weight to those who had contributed to popular culture proved controversial. In 1984, Gavin Stamp accused The Times of being ‘pathetically trendy’ for giving Dennis Wilson, a founding member of the Beach Boys, an obituary that stretched to seven column inches.[25] This was a third of the length of what the former chief education officer for Birmingham had been accorded that day. Stamp’s concerns were premature. The process of reaching out to the more popular arts proved to be a slow-moving one. As late as 1988, a familiar figure like the comic actor Kenneth Williams could have his entire Carry On film career summed up in two sentences, the second of which was ‘Smut, like beauty, was in the eye of the beholder.’[26]

It was not just a question of taking a dismissive view of popular entertainers. If any part of the old Times considered itself a department of the state apparatus it was the Court & Social page and this was reflected by those deemed worthy of an obituary notice. The emphasis was on public servants rather than those who had made their mark in the private sector. Obituaries of prominent businessmen were particularly weak. During the 1980s, attempts were made to widen the remit. Lord (Keith) Joseph and Sir Charles Pickthorn were engaged to suggest businessmen who should be included.[27] Yet, despite this effort, the results were still inadequate. Assessing the career of someone like Julius Strauss in only 363 words inevitably meant the analysis of his real contribution had to be summed up in two sentences: ‘In 1963 he helped to found the Eurobond market, which since then has grown from zero to $5000 billion. The word “Eurobond” was probably invented by him, though there are two other claimants: the late Sir Siegmund Warburg and the late Sir George Bolton.’[28] There was no room to explain the significance to the modern world economy of this development.

Only in extreme circumstances had the old Times spoken ill of the dead. The avoidance of the ‘hatchet job’ was a commendable approach that reflected well on the paper’s detachment from petty score settling with those who could no longer sue. But when it came to commemorating the ‘great and the good’ the lack of any attempt in the early 1980s at even mild objectivity was telling. This was particularly evident whenever a leading Conservative politician of progressive inclinations passed into history. The admiring obituary in 1982 of ‘one of the most accomplished and influential statesmen of the century’, Rab Butler, excellently conveyed his great strengths and the reasons for his importance while, for example, skating over his wartime defeatism and hostility towards Churchill in 1940 with the cryptic sentence, ‘His removal from the Foreign Office was surprisingly delayed until the summer of 1941.’[29] The clue was planted in the word ‘surprisingly’ but it was so discreet as to cause no upset to any of Butler’s friends and admirers and to deliberately leave most readers none the wiser. Similarly, the obituary for Sir Edward Boyle, who was also ‘one of the most distinguished Conservatives of his generation’, was written in such glowing terms that the casual reader would have been unaware there was any controversy over his commitment to axing grammar schools and replacing them with comprehensives. Over the succeeding twenty years the analysis became far more honest. By 2000, the death of Lady Plowden – who Boyle had appointed to chair the report that recommended child-centred teaching in primary schools, the very embodiment of progressive ‘trendy teaching’ – received a more balanced assessment which, without denigrating her as a person, at least mentioned that her legacy was controversial.[30]

This changing approach might be viewed as part of a social process in which the deference culture was diminished. It was also a response to improved competition. Throughout the first half of the 1980s, The Times had suffered from a lack of serious opposition from its rivals. By the mid-1980s, the paper was still providing more obituary space each day than the Telegraph did in a week while the Guardian averaged half a column on two days a week. All this changed in 1986 when the Daily Telegraph appointed Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd as its obituaries editor and the new Independent devoted double the space to obituaries than The Times had felt was required. Within a matter of months, the Telegraph and Independent were comprehensively outclassing The Times in an area in which it had previously reigned supreme. By 1990, the Independent was averaging five and a half columns to three and a half in The Times.

The Times, however, fought back. John Higgins was switched from the arts pages to run obituaries where he was assisted by three full-time members of staff commissioning and subbing the page. They made regular use of around fifty specialists who provided copy on the senior figures in their area of acquaintance or expertise. More than five thousand obituaries were kept on file and periodically updated so that they were ready for use when the time came. Few spent longer in the queue than the Queen Mother’s obituary, rewritten in 1987 by the then obituaries editor, John Grigg, and updated eight years later, which was one of a small minority that it was deemed sufficiently important to be kept ‘live’ in the computer. It was accessible only through the catchline ‘Mumsie’.[31]

In 1993, the improvements continued when Anthony Howard took over the helm. The son of a canon, Howard had been educated at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford. He had succeeded Jeremy Isaacs as chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club and, putting partisan feelings aside, had joined Michael Heseltine’s slate to run the Union. He had determined upon a career at the Bar but National Service – including being dispatched to the Canal Zone during the Suez Crisis – intervened and he returned, instead, set upon a career in journalism. Over the next thirty years he prospered at the Guardian and the Observer and as editor of the New Statesman and the Listener. He was also a noted political historian, editing Dick Crossman’s diaries (and subsequently writing his biography) as well as a life of Rab Butler. In charge of Times obits, Howard took a methodical approach. The amount of space set aside for an archbishop, a bishop, a dean or an archdeacon was virtually set in stone. Junior clergy had to have demonstrated some special reason to justify inclusion at a time when the Telegraph was developing a distinct market as the celebrator of the eccentric vicar. It transpired that it was the death of a bishop that prompted Howard into making an uncharacteristic slip that landed the paper in trouble. When he learned of the death of the Revd Brian Masters, Bishop of Edmonton, he was determined to write the obit himself. To many, the north London bishop’s death pealed no particular bell of recognition. Howard, however, was determined to damn a churchman who opposed the ordination of women and wrote an astonishingly vituperative assessment. Calling the bishop ‘one of the last relics’ and ‘like a clone to Graham Leonard’ (the Anglo-Catholic Bishop of London), the tone of the piece was unforgiving and contained such comments as, ‘The best that could be said for his sermons was that they tended to be short.’[32] The general feeling was that it was an ill-judged piece. Indeed, it generated more letters of complaint than any other obituary during the period. Uniquely, the Bishop of London denounced it from the pulpit of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Frontal assaults of this kind were an aberration. Speaking ill of the dead, particularly in an article that would be published when the corpse was scarcely cold, was generally recognized as a task that had to be undertaken with delicacy. However, the issue of the love that dare not speak its name was especially contentious. In 1976, The Times had caused outrage by mentioning in Tom Driberg’s obituary that he was homosexual, although it was hard to see how any worthwhile assessment of his life could have been made without mentioning the fact. In contrast, the 1983 obituary of Anthony Blunt, while balanced in its attention to his professional achievements and his treachery, made no reference to his private life or sexual preferences. Hugo Vickers wrote in the Spectator that the Blunt obituary reminded him of the highest praise he had ever heard for a Times obituary: ‘Hmm, sniffs of an inside job.’[33] Three years later the paper’s obituary of the ballet dancer Robert Helpmann caused fresh outrage by describing him as ‘a homosexual of the proselytizing kind, he could turn young men on the borderline his way’.[34] The then obituaries editor, the normally liberal-minded John Grigg, found himself the target of outrage from the ballet world at the ‘monstrous’ and ‘shabby’ slur. Sir Frederick Ashton declared it was ‘absolutely not’ the Helpmann he knew while Dame Ninette de Valois thought the reference ‘extremely distasteful’. The council of Equity, the actors’ union, tabled its ‘revulsion at the scurrilous attack’.

Sins of omission, real or assumed, also caused controversy. Simon Jenkins and John Higgins were involved in an acrimonious correspondence with Michael Thornton who was indignant that his obituary of the gardening journalist Peter Coats was published omitting his suggestion that Coats was the gay lover of Field Marshal Wavell. Coats had been Wavell’s ADC at the Viceregal Lodge in Delhi during the Second World War and, before publishing a claim that would certainly cause consternation and demands of a retraction, Jenkins wanted better proof than Thornton’s evidence that Coats had told him of the relationship. Thornton, a source for (in John Higgins’s words) ‘where show business rubs shoulders with what used to be London Society’, made clear he would never write obituaries for the paper again. Even in the version published, the obituary led to a letter being printed from Wavell’s daughter disavowing the passage that stated ‘the relationship between them was close, Wavell depending on Coats’s judgment in many matters. This influence over her husband was not much liked by the viceroy’s wife.’[35]

During the 1980s, there was rarely room to give more than a passport-sized photograph of the obituary’s subject matter. As the space expanded, so there was a conscious effort to find more expressive images. The decision to accompany the obituary of the former Labour Cabinet minister Lord (Fred) Mulley with the famous photograph of him dropping off to sleep next to the Queen during an air show to mark her Silver Jubilee was certainly defensible in terms of drawing the reader’s attention by commemorating the act for which the deceased politician was most famous. However, it caused outrage among his parliamentary colleagues on both sides of the House. Peter Stothard was inundated with letters expressing disgust that the paper had chosen to draw attention to a momentary lapse at the expense of a career devoted to public life. Charles Anson, the Buckingham Palace press secretary, even wrote to make the editor aware that the Queen had thought it unfair and unkind. This was, to all intents and purposes, a royal rebuke. Shamefaced, The Times published an apology for its error of judgment that, Anson assured Stothard, had been placed before Her Majesty for gracious inspection.[36]

The rule that criminals were not deserving of obituaries was imperfectly observed. Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker, had not been given an obituary despite the fact that when he died in 1981 he was an elected MP and a source of international interest. Yet, other criminals, especially those who had held public office somewhere else in the world, were sometimes accorded recognition. Stothard was keen for the ‘no criminals’ rule to be applied strictly. Infamous figures like the moors murderer Myra Hindley or Fred West received no recognition when they died. The same applied in 2000 to Reggie Kray even though an obituary had been prepared for him on the justification that his place in 1960s East End gangland culture made him an infamous figure in Britain’s history. The rule had been stretched to its ultimate extent earlier that year with the fatal shooting of Arkan, the Serb war criminal who had played his grisly part in the disintegration of Yugoslavia. His assassination was deemed to merit a leading article but, because of the protocol, not an obituary. Only when Stothard retired as editor was the rule relaxed so that those whose infamy had political or social implications beyond the mere depravity of their actions would receive attention.

At least in the decade up to 2002, The Times avoided the ultimate solecism of publishing the obituary of someone who was still living. The obituaries staff read the death notices (known as the ‘hotch’) every day to check nobody important had died and one of the aspects that Tony Howard found most difficult was having to check that the subject matter really had shuffled off the mortal coil. This involved phoning the deceased’s nearest relatives in order to enquire, in a sympathetic tone, whether the rumours were true. Working beside Howard was Ian Brunskill who had originally joined the paper’s arts pages. Together, they clawed back The Times’s position as the primary dictionary of the departed. The number of notices waiting on file gradually rose to around six thousand although, as the space in the paper increased, so the number of staff assisting the obituaries editor rose from four to six, supplemented by about 150 key contributors. Howard had a regular naval source who provided biographies of Royal Navy sailors and an Army source who did likewise for old soldiers. Other institutions, especially the Church and the major universities, also had their discreet observers.

Following on from Op-Ed, the leaders and letters pages, obituaries enjoyed a prime place that Howard was tenacious in defending despite periodic attempts to move it to the second section. Eventually, it was Ben Preston who persuaded Brunskill, Howard’s successor, to move obituaries to the second section in return for much more space. This materialized in the form of ‘The Register’. Far from being a demotion – as some at first feared – it represented a major expansion and The Times re-emerged as the paper with the greatest volume of obituary journalism. Brunskill relaxed Howard’s strict demarcation policy that equated rank to column inches. The greater space availability had other positive consequences. The number of foreigners commemorated was increased, despite the occasional complaints of readers who thought the section existed purely as a monument to British worthies. Even before ‘The Register’ was launched, the effect expanding the space availability had on the quality of analysis could be glimpsed by looking at how the paper analysed the lives of two refugees from Hitler’s Europe who made a particularly notable contribution to Britain’s cultural life – Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, who died in 1983, and Sir Ernst Gombrich, who died in 2001. Both obituaries were rightly admiring in tone but the extra space that the Gombrich obituary was able to utilize ensured that, in contrast to Pevsner, there was room to analyse the art historian’s views as well as record his achievements.[37]

Despite being invented in 2002, ‘The Register’ resembled a conservation area within a larger urban conurbation that had weathered surrounding change while preserving its own character intact. Supplemented with the announcements of the Court & Social page, it was certainly the living embodiment of the ‘journal of record’. In truth, this was less a matter of conservation as of improvement. The standards of the obituary columns had been raised considerably. The days had passed when some of them consisted of little more than – in Brunskill’s description – ‘adding verbs to a “Who’s Who” entry’.[38] Indeed, the paper entered the twenty-first century with obituary notices that had as good a claim as any to being the finest being published, day in day out, anywhere in the world. They had certainly come a long way since the 1930s when the paper’s obituaries editor, Frederick Lownes, occupied his time looking out of the window of the Garrick Club in search of the passing visages of famous people looking ill.

The pace of change remained sedate elsewhere in the Court & Social section of the paper. Indeed, the Court page’s staff had, somehow, managed to avoid the direct input into computer terminals directive to which all other journalists had succumbed when the paper made its moonlit flit to Wapping in 1986. Instead, they enjoyed the distinction of being the only journalists who received a daily visit from a subeditor who would read back to them what they had written. It was dignified, but was not efficient. Eventually, in the late 1990s, the nettle was grasped and direct input enforced. It made almost no difference to the layout of a page that, along with the law reports, changed less than any other section of the paper. Indeed, Court & Social and the law reports remained the strongest emblems of maintaining the ‘journal of record’ tradition. Below the royal coat of arms, the Court Circular announced the daily movements of the royal family with an unceasing adherence to protocol and the correct usage of the upper or lower case. ‘University News’ reported fellowship and professorial appointments in a manner unchanged since 1921. Parliamentary group luncheons, livery guild dinners and lectures at the likes of the Royal Geographical Society were all accorded notices. Even attendees at memorial services of the great and the good continued to be recognized in serried ranks of small type. For traditionally and punctiliously minded readers, these remained welcome reminders of the continuities of British social, metropolitan and intellectual life and a bulwark against the brasher displays accorded the new elite of celebrities and other supposed false idols. Despite strong competition in this department from the Daily Telegraph, placing a notice of a birth, forthcoming marriage or death in The Times remained sine qua non for those wishing to share personal news with a larger, sometimes imagined but often real, community of those who also turned to the same page for solace or curiosity. A sense of kinship was fostered and authority bestowed upon those whose names graced its page. The appearance was, of course, that of old-fashioned values decorously expressed, although the Personal Column was essentially also one of the most commercially minded parts of the paper.

Usually accompanying the Court & Social section were other familiar features that stood testimony to The Times’s seriousness of purpose. The Times brought together an impressive range of expert writers. Michael J. Hendrie, The Times’s astronomy correspondent, offered regular updates – complete with an accompanying diagram – of the movement of the planets and where to see the brighter stars of the night sky. Meanwhile, Professor Norman Hammond, the archaeological correspondent since 1967, had become one of the paper’s longest serving regular contributors. His columns demonstrated his breadth and versatility although he was a particular authority on Mayan civilization. His digs in the Mayan lowlands had, indeed, contributed towards an international recognition that included lengthy periods at the universities of Cambridge and Rutgers as well as visiting professorships at the University of California at Berkeley, at Jilin in China, Bonn University and at the Sorbonne. A succession of other specialists also provided regular copy. One of the most influential figures in the heritage lobby, Marcus Binney, wrote with great erudition and passion on architecture and the preservation of civilization’s bricks and mortar. Between August and December every year since 1981, Angus Nicol swung into action as the piping correspondent. The Times, indeed, must surely remain the only newspaper south of Berwick-upon-Tweed to profit from a regular bagpipe columnist. The ornithologist and Proust expert, Derwent May, closely observed birds and their habitats. Signing off with the initials DJM, May’s Nature Notes had appeared every Monday since 1982 and became daily when ‘The Register’ was launched in 2002. His style was governed by his observations of the changing seasons: ‘Lesser spotted woodpeckers are beginning to make their spring call in the treetops: it is a thin piping note, like a faint car alarm going off’ was a typical mode of introduction, rather in the manner of a Cold War spy affecting small talk, before eventually signing off with an equally conspiratorial rejoinder, ‘On London plane-trees, there are strings of prickly-looking seed-balls, many of which will go on dangling there until the leaves come out in April.’[39] These columns enjoyed a devoted following.

The Times’s range of expert correspondents extended to the more cerebral games and pastimes. From 1986, the chess correspondent was Raymond Keene. Keene was a grandmaster with a long list of accomplishments that included becoming British Chess Champion in 1971 and was eight times a member of the English Olympic team between 1977 and 1980. The organizer of several world championships, he was the natural choice to oversee the 1993 Kasparov vs Short contest that was sponsored by The Times. He became the paper’s daily columnist in 1995 and also found time to write more than 110 books on chess, which was a world record. Such was his mental ability that, in 1990, Lancashire police asked him to solve a chess-based puzzle that a computer designer had devised while being detained on suspicion of murdering an ex-girlfriend. Handed a puzzle that involved four chess pieces, a board drawn in the outline of a map and a series of moves, the police believed the suspect was providing them with the coordinates for the shallow grave of the disappeared woman. Keene examined it and concluded that her remains might be buried in Ireland, north-west of Limerick. No body was ever located, however, and the suspect was released.[40] Meanwhile, as bridge correspondents, both Robert Sheehan and his successor, Andrew Robson, dealt a daily hand to a large and conscientious following among the readership. Robson, a former World Junior Champion, was one of the youngest players to win the European championship in 1991 and was the first English player to win a US major, which he did two years running. The author of Common Mistakes: And How to Avoid Them also started the Andrew Robson Bridge Club, which became the largest in the land.

Nonetheless, the undisputed monarch among The Times’s daily offering of games and brainteasers was the crossword. The first had appeared in 1930 and a second, concise crossword, was added in 1983. The paper had also instituted an annual championship in 1970. When Dr Helen Ougham, a scientist at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research at Aberystwyth, won it in October 1995 (the first woman to do so) she solved the four puzzles in an average of eleven minutes. As crossword editor between 1983 and 1995, John Grant presided over a team of twelve regular compilers that included a former Scrabble champion, an ex-IBM executive, a French horn player, a retired Army officer, a postman and Brian Greer, a lecturer at Queen’s University, Belfast, specializing in the psychology of mathematics education. Having been on the team for twenty years, it was Greer who succeeded Grant as editor in 1995 when the paper celebrated its 20,000th crossword. There was only one serious error – in March 1986, puzzle number 17,005 was published with the wrong grid. ‘More than a hundred readers nevertheless solved it on grids of their own devising,’ Grant recalled, ‘and even suggested it was more fun that way.’[41] More than seventy years after its inception, The Times crossword not only remained a national institution, it retained its reputation as perhaps the most recognized test of daily mental agility. This, in itself, was no small achievement.

III

Anthony Howard believed that the journalist’s working life had changed remarkably – and not necessarily for the better – since he was first enlisted into its ranks in 1958. Instead of getting out and about in search of stories, reporters had become ‘largely dependent on the information revolution. You scan the Internet, you look at what all the news agencies have to say – all there supplied and ready-processed on your desk.’ He pitied Wapping’s ‘galley-slaves’ with ‘sandwiches to eat at their desks, crouched over their terminals from 10.30 till 6.30, never seeing anyone, working the phone quite hard, but never actually going out into the real world’. Lobby correspondents, operating from the bars and corridors of Westminster and Whitehall, were a rare exception.[42] There was some accuracy in Howard’s depiction of desk-bound journalism. In fairness, the revolution in information technology meant there was usually far more readily accessible material to be had by staying close to one’s computer screen than by standing around expectantly in pubs. In this respect, perhaps The Times had not moved on so far from its established mid-twentieth-century role as the great information interchange in which experienced subeditors polished other agencies’ wire reports and disseminated officially released information. Yet even that was only partly true. Then, as in the early twenty-first century, the great disclosures still came through personal contacts and a questing spirit that was not easily put off by obfuscation. Front-line journalists like Anthony Loyd, Richard Beeston and Janine di Giovanni could hardly be accused of a reticence to go deep into hostile territory in search of stories at no small risk to their own welfare. They were in the tradition of the celebrated and fearless reporters who had brought such fame to The Times in bygone days. Technological advances greatly assisted foreign correspondents’ means of communication. During the 1980s, they still had to get back to an office where they could file their copy through the fraught and time consuming medium of the telex machine. Even in the early 1990s, getting hold of London could take hours. Mary Dejevsky recalled her attempts to cover the Ukrainian independence referendum in December 1991. She tried to file from Lvov, only to be told there was a thirty-six hour wait for an available foreign telephone line. ‘There was nothing you could do except go to the post office and yell at people or hope that London called you,’ she recalled.[43] Her only option was to fly to Kiev and try from there. Fog, however, ensured that the planes were cancelled, so she had to hire a black-market car and drive for eight hours through the snow and rain in order to get the story out. Such experiences were typical until the advent of mobile phones and electronic filing shrunk the world.

There was always something romantic about the notion of the foreign correspondent sending dispatches from exotic locations but those reporting from domestic shores were no less capable of winkling out information from some of its most concealed crevices. Indeed, in the last twenty years of the twentieth century, the amount of information leaked to journalists from those in official positions seemed far greater than in any previous age. Not all these disclosures were totally unsolicited. Often they were the result of a long period in which trust had been developed through mutual acquaintance. Such was the success of the fourth estate’s ability to live by disclosure that some wondered whether it was irreparably damaging the culture of trust that made public governance possible.

Sometimes the criticism has not been that increasingly sedentary journalists have missed stories but rather that they have not taken sufficient care to establish the facts before rushing with indecent haste to claim a scoop. The Hitler diaries fiasco was a case in point. Earlier in the century, The Times could not always have been accused of rushing to judge. It had sufficient time to report in relative depth on the news pages the dropping of the first atom bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, yet it opted not to bother changing the leader column on that day to discuss what was potentially the most momentous event in world history – one that might virtually bring it to an end. From a modern perspective, this reluctance to comment appears reticent to the point of sheer laziness and, had it been the modus operandi in response to 9/11, readers would have questioned why they were purchasing a paper that could not rise to a challenge that was eagerly being met by the twenty-four-hour rolling news services of television, radio and the internet. In short, such a detached attitude would no longer be considered acceptable. Yet, The Times’s Blackfriars of 1945 would have argued that taking time to ponder such a major development was less unprofessional than rushing in with a gut reaction when a period of careful consideration was the only response equal to the moment. This was a mode of thought made famous by Zhou Enlai when he answered a question about the meaning of the French Revolution with the answer, ‘It is too early to tell.’ Zhou, however, was not in the business of selling newspapers.

Such a detached attitude, even if desirable, is no longer possible. The market will look for alternative news sources that will provide near-instant responses. Reticence is not of itself an attribute. It has to be accepted that analytical journalism can never be more than the daily practice of risk assessment. If historians cannot agree about the cause and effect of events that took place deep in the past despite the advantages of hindsight and a steady accretion of information in the meantime, it is not reasonable to assume that those writing the first draft of history for the morning’s newspapers will have a monopoly on truth or wisdom. Looking back with the advantages of fifty years’ experience in Fleet Street, William Rees-Mogg made the assessment that, ‘Any journalist who gets his judgments right more than half the time is doing quite well. Our job is to make the best judgment that can be made on the first day, when the cork has come out of the bottle but the wine has not yet been poured.’[44] It is debateable whether the greater reticence in reacting to events made by the mid-twentieth-century Times ensured it any better diagnostic results. The ability of The Times of 2001 to respond to the unimaginable calamity of 9/11 by producing within a matter of hours a paper whose reporting and analysis remained calm, measured and authoritative in its tone was a tribute to how its journalists had maintained standards of the highest professionalism despite the increased pressures placed upon them by expectant readers. Indeed, by the twenty-first century, the question of whether ‘fast news’ was a good thing was, in any case, entirely academic. Flashing up-to-the-minute news on the paper’s website was an implicit requirement, not an optional extra. Internet users had the ability to surf rival sites at the click of an electronic mouse in search of the most up-to-date news and comment. News providers who hesitated lost.

A failure to provide a virtual paper on the web was not a viable option when the rivals all chose to do so. In terms of attracting the major advertisers, newspapers had been losing market share to television throughout the period covered in this book.[45] It remained to be seen whether launching websites would prove to be the alternative visual medium that allowed them to claw some of that share back. The Guardian made a huge investment in its online version during the 1990s and succeeded in attracting a large audience from the United States in particular. Online services proved to be the most effective means yet invented of disseminating newspapers around the world. Among the British broadsheets, Times Online moved into second place ahead of FT.com. Meanwhile, despite having the highest sales of any broadsheet newspaper, the Telegraph’s website slid into fourth position. Charging to read the online paper ran the risk of diverting readers to rival free sites and the launch of the BBC’s online news service made it difficult for newspapers to introduce registration fees. Naturally, there were fears that if readers could access the material for free, the paper would lose revenue. However, the research suggested that around a half of Times Online users were not regular readers of the print edition. Thus, while the paper was inevitably losing sales to those – often in office environments where the internet costs were borne by the business – who were browsing without charge on their computer screens, it was also gaining a new audience from those who would not have bothered to look at it at all if the only means of doing so involved interacting with a newsagent. This new market created opportunities for advertisers seeking space on the virtual paper as well as for hooking new readers to its printed format.

Internet ‘fast news’ did not undermine the traditional role of The Times; rather, it re-enforced the necessity of in-depth journalism to offer a more rounded product. Breaking news on the internet or the ‘soundbite’ journalism favoured by the visually dependent medium of television could not compete with the weightier analysis the newspaper provided at its best. Even this was a question of finding a balance. Simon Kelner, who, as editor of the Independent, pioneered the tabloid-sized quality daily (or ‘compact’) and put partisan opinion on its front page, suggested that in the future newspapers would respond to the internet and television twenty-four-hour rolling news challenge by evolving into ‘viewspapers’ instead.[46] Newspaper would become, in effect, daily opinion-led magazines. Was this the future of The Times? If so, it would mark the end of its more than two-hundred-year mission to inform. It is hard to imagine its reputation could be other than irrevocably tarnished. In fact, the Kelner prophecy seemed an excessively pessimistic one. When a longer perspective is eventually provided, 9/11 might be seen as a defining moment for quality newspapers. People immediately switched on the television to view the vivid and appalling images and to keep abreast of the breaking news. Yet the next morning and in the days and weeks thereafter, sales of broadsheet newspapers, including The Times, soared. Even when the news was at its most graphic, the print media was still seen to provide what the more visual electronic media could not.

IV

Before Murdoch acquired the title, buying The Times was a morning ritual for some who believed it was a badge that could be displayed as evidence of having joined an exclusive club rather than because they thought it was necessarily the best all-round newspaper. After the siege of Wapping, the Independent was portrayed as the new Times – embodying the old paper’s qualities but without the associations of being owned by a Reagan-admiring Australian-American tabloid magnate. ‘It is, are you?’ became the motto on the new badge for those who liked to be thought of as independent-minded people with a newspaper under their arm that proclaimed that very quality. In one sense, by 2002 the Independent had indeed begun to resemble the pre-Murdoch Times. It had a circulation of only a quarter of a million, could not afford to invest as much in journalism as its rivals and – despite its title – was dependent for survival on being bankrolled by a foreign domiciled proprietor. As has been noted, the proportion of ‘A’ grade readers that were attracted suggested that the Independent never quite managed to topple The Times at the upper end of the market. But unquestionably many newspaper purchasers liked the idea of a paper that declared independence from its masthead, even in the days when it was actually in the grip of the Mirror Group. In contrast, a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch was assumed not to be independent. There was a natural self-interest in The Times’s commercial rivals portraying it as the mouthpiece of its owner. By questioning the objectivity of the paper’s judgment, these attacks hit at the heart of its appeal. Every editorial decision, from backing the Conservatives to backing New Labour was, sooner or later, attributed to Murdoch’s hidden hand. Differences of opinion not only between his British newspapers but also with his own supposed opinions were disregarded or overlooked.

Those at the helm of other News Corp.-owned assets might have had different experiences, but a detailed survey of the first twenty-one years of Murdoch’s ownership of The Times can only conclude that the interesting feature is how little, rather than how much, he has influenced its editorial politics. The one editor who complained about coming under pressure to justify the paper’s opinions was Harold Evans although there was no occasion when a change of line actually ensued. The suggestion that the decision to replace Evans as editor was largely due to political differences is hotly disputed. The issue of The Times’s Chinese coverage and whether there was a conflict of interest with News Corp.’s Far East business aspirations has been examined in Chapter Twelve. There are also a few other scattered complaints: a belief among some that there is a pro-Israeli bias that emanates, however indirectly, from the proprietor’s opinions, or the ordeal of the education correspondent, John Clare, who once had to endure a lengthy monologue in which Murdoch vehemently expounded his own (conflicting) views on the subject.[47] Compared to the evidence that the proprietor has not interfered in the paper’s politics, these charges hardly sweep all before them. The ‘Murdoch press’ was not, for instance, delivered on a plate to Tony Blair. According to Murdoch’s recollection of events, he did not even know what party The Times was going to support in the 1997 general election and was surprised to read it had opted to back a specific cause instead. This is also the recollection of the editor at the time. Peter Stothard, indeed, claimed that he had never received a political instruction: ‘In all the time I’ve been writing, I can’t remember ever having heard the words “that’s a great leader” or “that’s a terrible leader”’ from Murdoch. Far from being the recipient of unsolicited comments on the line the paper took, Stothard admitted, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen an email from Rupert.’ Telephone conversations, when they occurred, usually took the form of Murdoch ringing for an informal chat about how everything was going on the paper and what was making the news in Britain. Indeed, by the 1990s, the proprietor’s trips to Wapping were not frequent. New York was his base and the film, television and satellite divisions of his business increasingly occupied his time. It was as likely that Sky’s fortunes would take him to London as any pressing matter with his broadsheets. The Times was one of more than 175 titles he owned in three continents. Even if he was minded to interfere, the sheer scale of his other international commitments restricted his opportunities to do so. Partly because of his expanding interests, the editors of The Times in the 1990s saw or heard much less of their proprietor than did their predecessors in the 1980s.[48]

This was not just Stothard’s experience. Simon Jenkins recalled that Murdoch was ‘scrupulous’ about not breaking his guarantees on editorial independence. ‘I didn’t have one discussion with Rupert on editorial policy,’ Jenkins maintained. Yet this is not to say the proprietor exercised benign neglect. He remained a nuts and bolts newspaperman, easily annoyed by a bad picture headline or squashed ‘basement’ article layout. He never forgot the lessons taught him as a young trainee on the Daily Express’s backbench by Edward Pickering. While Murdoch left his Times editors to get on with their political postures, Jenkins discovered, ‘He was obsessive about where the pictures were going and where the money was going and this and that was going.’ On occasions when he did come over to The Times, he had the unnerving habit of leafing through the morning’s paper while mumbling dismissive observations about how poorly it was laid out or the priority given to different articles. ‘In many ways,’ conceded Jenkins, ‘that’s more demoralizing than having someone telling you whether you’ve got to be pro or anti abortion.’[49]

Successful partnerships between editor and proprietor depended upon a mutual understanding of what was to be rendered unto Caesar. The proprietor had to keep out of the politics of the paper and (despite his inclinations to be a chief sub) the daily decisions that were matters of editorial judgment. In turn, the editor had to recognize that major strategic decisions with budget implications had to be agreed with the proprietor. There was nothing exceptional in this division of powers. It was in areas of grand strategy that Murdoch made his personal mark on the paper, deciding whether it could afford to undercut its rivals in cover price, invest in more business pages to take on the FT or change the number of sections in which it was printed. It was at this level that he intervened. Given his enthusiastic endorsement of investing in more sports pages, it might be contested that Murdoch’s influence was as much manifested in expanding the paper’s coverage of the Euro ‘96 football championship as its opposition to the euro currency.

Murdoch was not interested in owning The Times as a ticket into the British Establishment and nor was it deployed effectively as his prime weapon in exerting political power. As far as he perceived it, Margaret Thatcher cared much more about where the massed battalions of the Sun were going to attack.[50] During the government of her successor, The Times did little to endear itself to those in power, yet nor did it align itself with the official Opposition either. It could not even quite bring itself to endorse the party that was obviously going to win the 1997 general election by a landslide majority. If the paper’s wires were pulled to a particular and cynical strategy, it was hard to comprehend what the agenda was. Rather, Murdoch’s motivating interest in The Times seemed to relate more clearly to its central place in the history and development of his first and greatest hobby – newspapers. It was the paper from whose offices his father had once worked, the paper whose life had been saved in 1908 by Sir Keith Murdoch’s friend and patron, Lord Northcliffe. In Britain, at least, the populist Northcliffe is the press baron with whom Keith Rupert Murdoch has been most frequently compared.

Murdoch made his name as an owner of tabloids who then bought his way into broadsheets. Nicholas Coleridge has suggested, ‘had he acquired his papers in a different order – if The Times, the South China Morning Post and The Australian had come first – and he’d only then moved on to buy the tabloids, the world’s perception of him would be substantially different … But that is an idle scenario, since in the Murdoch empire it has always been the profits of the tabloids that have funded the loftier acquisitions.’[51] Of course, his purchase of The Times was not conceived in a fit of sentimentality alone. It came as part of a package that included the highly profitable Sunday Times. Furthermore, The Times was, and remained, the company’s flagship newspaper and, as such, added value – however indirectly – to the international prestige of News Corporation. Reflecting in June 2002 on the growth of News Corp. from an Australian newspaper group to a global media organization, its president, Peter Chernin, stated his belief that acquiring The Times in 1981 ‘was the real transforming purchase of the company’.[52] Yet it was never just another deal. Murdoch enjoyed a challenge. Earlier that same month, he had been asked in an interview what he thought would be his lasting contribution as a patron of the popular arts. Without pausing for thought, he answered, ‘Saving The Times.’[53]

V

Was The Times still an influential newspaper in the manner in which it could make that boast earlier in the twentieth century? It was the experience of Les Hinton, executive chairman of News International from 1995, that politicians tended to approach him more frequently about what the Sun was writing about them, while bankers and lawyers were far more likely to want to discuss something published in The Times.[54] The Sun unquestionably had the weight of numbers on its side and that was no small matter in a democracy. The great strength of The Times was not just in its news reporting (other papers were also good at that) but also in the quality of its ‘specialist’ writers. Frances Gibbs as legal correspondent, Michael Evans as defence correspondent and Ruth Gledhill as religion correspondent not only reported news, they wrote from the perspective of deep knowledge of their subject and personal acquaintance with those who were at its forefront. The possession of such expertise was central to the paper’s ability to convey authority.

In contrast, the importance of the leading article has declined markedly since the 1950s when a Times editorial really was judged according to its contribution to the thinking of those who ran the country. That it should count for less before the bar of world opinion half a century later is hardly surprising. Having declined as a world power, the British view counted for less and thus, consequently, so did the pronouncements of its most famous newspaper. And within Britain, the growing plurality of published and broadcast opinion naturally diminished the claim of any one voice to speak with overweening authority. This increasing plurality of opinion also undermined the status of the leading article within The Times itself. In the 1950s, the paper published news reports and leading articles, but not much independent comment. The growth of the columnist – of which Bernard Levin, Matthew Parris and Simon Jenkins shone brightly in the paper’s constellation – significantly broadened the forum for debate. Surmounting this, the often daily political editor’s briefing by Peter Riddell, foreign editor’s briefing by Bronwen Maddox and business editor’s briefing by Patience Wheatcroft created additional poles for authoritative comment. Taken collectively, they reduced the leading column to the ruminations that come out of a process of consensus decision making. This was not of itself a detraction. It made the leaders special and distinct from the personal perspectives of the star columnists.

The academic attainments and intellectual breadth of the principal leader writers of the past twenty years – Owen Hickey, Peter Stothard, Rosemary Righter and Tim Hames – hardly suggested the fine art had passed into the hands of crude hacks. Were these cultivated minds wasting their erudition on leading articles that only they and those they hoped to impress actually read? On a day-to-day basis, a Times leader rarely made the ‘political weather’ among those for whom it was primarily aimed – the top policy and opinion formers in the country. Yet where The Times stood on major issues at key moments still ensured it was an important barometer of informed opinion. Perhaps this was because the paper’s politics were less predictably partisan than those of the Telegraph, the Guardian or (increasingly) the Independent while, if voting for Neil Kinnock was any judge, the editorial line in the FT appeared to have little impact in swaying informed opinion. During the 1990s no other broadsheet’s leading articles could be seen to have consistently carried more weight than those of The Times.

One assumption remains. It is that in the late 1960s and 1970s The Times was a liberal Conservative newspaper propped up by an indulgent proprietor, Lord Thomson, and that thereafter it was a more strident newspaper forced into an excessively commercial approach by the rapacious bottom-line capitalism of its owner, Rupert Murdoch. In fact, much changed so that much could stay the same. After twenty-one years of ownership, Murdoch had become almost as indulgent as the traditional proprietors he was supposed to have replaced. He had pumped millions of pounds, with surprisingly mild complaint, into a newspaper that still failed to make great profits for his company. Even the paper’s political outlook had changed less than might be imagined. In backing first Margaret Thatcher and, after about 2000, Tony Blair, it was performing its traditional twentieth-century function as a moderating rather than an instinctively hostile counsel to the government of the day. The period of the Major Government, which it attacked from a principled but non-party perspective, was the break from habit in this respect. Like Rees-Mogg personally, it had become disillusioned with the cause of European federalism (although not the notion of a European family of nations) and remained sympathetic to an Israeli state that continued to find itself surrounded by Middle Eastern enemies. In general tone, The Times of 2002 resembled closely the paper Rees-Mogg and the Thomson family handed over to News International in 1981: a liberal Conservative newspaper still, generally free market in outlook and intolerant of those who pandered to gut prejudices whether from left or right. Indeed, its endorsement of Labour in the 2001 general election called into question whether it was even light blue. Like the new Establishment and the pages of the FT, it contained shades of soft fuchsia. In this, the paper was a product of its times.

What, therefore, would a historian in fifty or a hundred years time deduce from the changing pattern of The Times’s interests and obsessions between 1981 and 2002? A declining interest in the proceedings of parliamentary government would be obvious, although not of executive authority. A broadening in artistic and cultural perspectives would be a growth area, not least the seriousness with which middlebrow or popular forms of entertainment and expression were increasingly accorded attention. There would be much more evidence that women played a larger part in writing and reading the paper. Continuity would be found in the editorialising of the leader page, the columnists and the preoccupations of letter writers. The business pages would also contain much that was familiar, although better written and with more imaginative graphics. The phenomenal growth of interest in sport – and in particular the doings on and off the football pitch – would be of particular note. The historian would be struck not only by a less cluttered layout, with wider margins of space and bigger headlines but also by how much more visual it had become in its presentation. High-resolution photographs that might stretch across a third of a page had replaced grainy images ranging in size from the postage stamp to a small postcard. The newspaper had responded to the visual power of its deadliest rival, television. These changes would be even more apparent if a historian compared The Times of 2002 with that of the inter-war or early post-war years. There would be difficulty in locating writers in the old paper capable of blending satire and penetrating insight with the literary brio of Matthew Parris. Nor would a mid-century equivalent of Simon Barnes be easily identified in the sports section. The inter-war business pages would certainly not be read for pleasure. The cryptic crossword would be just as vexing.

Explaining his reasons for starting his newspaper, John Walter, the founder of The Times, informed his readers in the first edition on 1 January 1785 that it ‘ought to be the register of the times, and faithful recorder of every species of intelligence; it ought not to be engrossed by any particular object; but, like a well covered table, it should contain something suited to every palate’.[55] Times moved on, but the founder’s vision was honoured.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Rupert Murdoch announces he is buying The Times, 22 January 1981, with Harold Evans (left) and William Rees-Mogg © Times Newspapers Limited

Gray’s Inn Road, home of The Times from 1974 to 1986 © Times Newspapers Limited

Harold Evans © Times Newspapers Limited

Sir Edward Pickering © Times Newspapers Limited

Rupert Murdoch as Times proprietor in his Press Hall © The Sunday Times

Editor Charles Douglas-Home addresses his staff, March 1982 © Times Newspapers Limited

Lord Dacre heads to Hamburg to tell the world the Hitler diaries are genuine in April 1983 © Press Association

Rupert Murdoch and the Queen mark The Times’s bicentenary in 1985 © Times Newspapers Limited

Charles Douglas-Home at a point-to-point © Jim Meads

Charles Douglas-Home in his hospital bed © Times Newspapers Limited

Charles Wilson, editor 1985–1990 © Times Newspapers Limited

Rupert Murdoch briefs the press on the deadlock in talks with the print unions, 19 January 1986 © Graeme Cookson

The Siege of Wapping, 1986

A scuffle outside The Times during the Wapping dispute, 17 February 1986 © News Group Newspapers

Print unions march down Fleet Street in January 1987 © Press Association

Striking News International workers shout at former colleagues during the Wapping dispute © Press Association Photos

The arson of News International’s warehouse in Deptford, 2 June 1986

Times journalists take the honours at the 1988 British Press Awards © Times Newspapers Limited

The Times’s Wapping office © Peter Trievnor

Simon Jenkins © Times Newspapers Limited

Andrew Knight © Times Newspapers Limited

Bernard Levin © Times Newspapers Limited

Matthew Parris in Kabul © Times Newspapers Limited

Peter Stothard © Times Newspapers Limited

John Bryant © Daily Mail

Rosemary Righter © Martin Beddall

Simon Barnes © Times Newspapers Limited

Lynne Truss © Martin Beddall

Caitlin Moran © Times Newspapers Limited

Peter Brookes © Peter Brookes

The Times team interviews Tony Blair during the 1997 election campaign © Times Newspapers Limited

Anatole Kaletsky © Times Newspapers Limited

Michael Gove © Times Newspapers Limited

Mary Ann Sieghart © Times Newspapers Limited

Sandra Parsons © Times Newspapers Limited

Patience Wheatcroft © Times Newspapers Limited

Richard Morrison © Times Newspapers Limited

Richard Beeston in Iraq © Majid Karimian

Anthony Loyd in Afghanistan © Seamus Murphy

Sam Kiley © Times Newspapers Limited

Janine di Giovanni under fire in Aghanistan © Miami Herald/Andrew Bosch

Peter Stothard says farewell, March 2002 © Times Newspapers Limited

While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future editions.

PLATES

Rupert Murdoch announces he is buying The Times, flanked by its incoming and outgoing editors, Harold Evans and William Rees-Mogg.

Gray’s Inn Road, home of The Times from 1974 to 1986.

Harold Evans

Sir Edward Pickering, editor for Beaverbrook and mentor to Murdoch.

The proprietor in his Press Hall.

March 1982, Charles Douglas-Home announces his editorial intentions. Fred Emery reserves judgement.

Lamb to the slaughter. Lord Dacre on his way to Hamburg to tell the world’s press that the Hitler diaries are genuine.

Murdoch gives the Queen a crash course in page make-up when she visits the paper for its bicentenary in 1985.

Douglas-Home clears the hedges at a point-to-point.

Facing the final hurdle. Douglas-Home continued editing The Times in the last weeks of his life from a hospital bed.

Charles Wilson, editor 1985–1990.

Flanked by Bill O’Neill and Bruce Matthews, Rupert Murdoch briefs the press on the deadlock in talks with the print unions, 19 January 1986.

Peterloo ’86: The Siege of Wapping.

The nightly scuffles outside The Times during the Wapping dispute resulted in almost 1,500 arrests.

The print unions on the march, 24 January 1987. Mike Hicks was convicted for assault.

‘Sc-aaa-b!’ The blackleg welcoming committee serenade their former colleagues.

The arson of News International’s warehouse in Deptford – the most intense blaze in London since the Blitz.

Times journalists take the honours at the 1988 British Press Awards. Robert Fisk, Bernard Levin, Howard Foster, John Woodcock, Barbara Amiel and John Goodbody.

Like life on a nuclear submarine, there was little legroom in The Times’s elongated and windowless Wapping home. From the upper gantry, Charlie Wilson could berate the ratings.

Simon Jenkins

Andrew Knight

Bernard Levin at home.

Downtown Kabul. Matthew Parris at ease with the locals.

Peter Stothard, editor 1992–2002.

John Bryant, distance runner and deputy editor.

Rosemary Righter, an accomplished duellist with the pen against tyranny’s swords.

Simon Barnes with a friend.

Lynne Truss. Sport for all.

Caitlin Moran. Testimonies of youth.

Peter Brookes, master cartoonist.

Gentlemen of The Times pay Tony Blair a house call during the 1997 election campaign. Clockwise from Blair are Peter Stothard, Anatole Kaletsky, Alastair Campbell (Blair’s press secretary) and Peter Riddell.

Anatole Kaletsky

Michael Gove

Mary Ann Sieghart

Sandra Parsons

Patience Wheatcroft.

Arts editor Richard Morrison always cast a cultured eye.

Halabja, northern Iraq, 1988. Richard Beeston uncovers the victims of Saddam’s chemical weapons attack on his Kurdish subjects.

A light in the darkness. Anthony Loyd files from the Afghan battlefront in 2001.

Sam Kiley. Genocidal Hutus in Rwanda assumed he was a friendly French paratrooper on a secret mission.

Afghanistan: Janine di Giovanni comes under fire on the road to Tora Bora.

The last word. Peter Stothard bids farewell after ten years as editor, applauded by his deputy editor, Ben Preston, Ben Macintyre (seated) and George Brock, managing editor.

NOTES

CHAPTER ONE: A LICENCE TO LOSE MONEY (PP. 1–44)

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.

CHAPTER TWO: ‘THE GREATEST EDITOR IN THE WORLD’ (PP. 45–118)

1. Hugh Stephenson to Denis Hamilton, 13 February 1981, Hamilton Papers 9383/12.

2. Quoted in Michael Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 203.

3. Owen Hickey to Denis Hamilton, 11 February 1981, Hamilton Papers 9383/12.

4. John Grigg, The History of The Times, vol. VI: The Thomson Years, p. 376; Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 201.

5. Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.

6. Bruce Page, ‘Into the arms of Count Dracula’, New Statesman, 30 January 1981.

7. Rupert Murdoch to the annual lunch of the Advertising Association, quoted in TNL News, April 1981.

8. Richard Searby to the author, interview, 11 June 2002; Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, pp. 204–5.

9. Marmaduke Hussey, Chance Governs All, p. 179.

10. 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.

11. Louis Heren, February 1981, Quarterly of the Commonwealth Press Union.

12. Hugh Stephenson, ‘Not the age of The Times’, New Statesman, 11 January 1985.

13. Harold Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 188–9.

14. Evans in British Journalism Review, vol. 13, no. 4, 2002.

15. Michael Leapman, Treacherous Estate, 1992, p. 51.

16. Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 340.

17. TNL News, April 1981.

18. Spectator, 20 June 1981.

19. Ibid., 28 February 1981.

20. Harold Evans to Frank Giles, 27 and 29 April 1981, Evans files.

21. Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 253.

22. Evans Day File, 29 April 1981.

23. Evans Day File, 6 April 1981.

24. 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.

25. The Times, 23 October 1980.

26. Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 263.

27. Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.

28. The Times, 23 November 1963.

29. Ibid., 2 April 1981.

30. Evans to Rupert Davenport-Hines (and others), 14 June 1981, Evans Day File.

31. Private Eye, 28 August 1981; Evans to Anthony Whitaker, 23 October 1981, Evans Day File, A327/3692.

32. Evans Day File, 22 May 1981.

33. Evans to N. P. L. Price, 27 May 1981, Evans Day File.

34. Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.

35. Ibid.

36. Gerald Long to Herbert Kremp (joint editor-in-chief Die Welt), 15 June 1981, Evans file 1, A153–658; TNL News.

37. John Grieg to Harold Evans, 9 March 1981 Evans box 1.

38. Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 271, 274.

39. Evans, press release, 30 July 1981.

40. Lord Astor to Gerald Long, 30 July 1981, A153–655.

41. TNL News, August 1981.

42. Jack Lonsdale, letter in TNL News, October 1981.

43. Evans to Colin Watson, 10 January 1982, Evans Day File A759/9329.

44. Evans to Henry Kissinger, 21 May 1981, Evan Day File.

45. Frank Johnson to the author, interview, 15 January 2003.

46. Paul Johnson, Spectator, 11 March and 21 March 1981.

47. Fred Emery, The Times, 11 March 1981.

48. The Times, leading article (by Harold Evans), 11 March 1981; Evans Good Times, Bad Times, p. 214.

49. Evans to Michael Foot, 26 March 1981, Evans Day File A327/3626.

50. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, pp. 137–8.

51. The Times, 30 March 1981.

52. The Times, leading article, ‘An Avalanche of Economists’, 31 March 1981.

53. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 138.

54. Patrick Minford, The Times, 7 April 1981.

55. Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11, 1992, p. 98.

56. ‘The Price of Floating’, leading article, The Times, 8 July 1981.

57. ‘The Ottawa Opportunity’, leading article, The Times, 17 July 1981; see Grigg, The Thomson Years, p. 390; Edmund Dell, The Chancellors, p. 427.

58. James Tobin, The Times, 14 October 1981.

59. ‘Britain’s Economic Legacy’, leading article, The Times, 27 January 1982.

60. ‘The Flexible Side of EMS’, leading article, The Times, 6 October 1981.

61. ‘Wanted: European Vision’, leading article, The Times, 2 December 1981.

62. Charles Hargrove and Ian Murray, The Times, 11 March 1981.

63. ‘The Choice for France’, leading article, The Times, 12 May 1981.

64. Ronald Butt, The Times, 14 May 1981.

65. Letter to the editor, The Times, 30 May 1981.

66. Christopher Thomas, The Times, 11 April 1981.

67. Leading article, The Times, 11 April 1981.

68. Ibid., 5 May 1981.

69. ‘If Ireland Is To Be United’, leading article, The Times, 2 July 1981.

70. ‘Fermanagh Does It Again’, leading article, The Times, 22 August 1981.

71. Martin Huckerby, The Times, 13 April 1981.

72. The Times, 13 April 1981; Sasthi Brata, The Times, 15 April 1981.

73. Leading articles, The Times, 14 April, 7 July and 13 July 1981.

74. ‘The Soiled Coin’, leading article, The Times, 10 July 1981.

75. ‘The Scarman Report’, leading article, The Times, 26 November 1981.

76. Darcus Howe, The Times, 26 November 1981.

77. ‘Moonshine and Money’ and ‘A Hard Winter’, leading articles, The Times, 17 September and 20 October 1981.

78. Diana Geddes, The Times, 30 March 1981.

79. ‘Universities Under the Knife’ and ‘The Cost of University Cuts’, leading articles, The Times, 3 July and 10 October 1981.

80. Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 218–19.

81. Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party, p. 261.

82. The Times, 27 March 1981.

83. ‘The Gang Becomes a Party’, leading article, The Times, 27 March 1981.

84. Crewe and King, SDP, p. 257.

85. Ibid., p. 254.

86. Geoffrey Taylor, Changing Faces: History of The Guardian, 1956–1988, p. 213.

87. The Times, 23 October 1981; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 289.

88. Frank Johnson, ‘A Happy Party, Fit for all Factions’, The Times, 16 September 1986.

89. Frank Johnson, The Times, 15 September 1982.

90. Nicholas Wapshott’s interview with Ken Livingstone, The Times, 14 May 1981.

91. Evans to Lord George Brown, 2 July 1981, Evans Day File.

92. The Times, 23 and 23 September 1981.

93. Bernard Donoughue, 10 September 1981, Evans Day File 1/17.

94. The Times, 25 September 1981.

95. Tony Benn, letter to the editor, The Times, 26 September 1981.

96. Evans to features, home and business editors, 29 October 1981, Evans Day File 1/17.

97. Evans Day File, A327/3626.

98. Tony Benn, quoted in the Daily Telegraph, 28 September 1981.

99. ‘Unfinished Business’, leading article, The Times, 1 October 1981.

100. Tony Benn, quoted in The Times, 13 March 1982.

101. Ibid., 27 January 1982.

102. Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, p. 182.

103. Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 324.

104. Michael Ruda, interview, ‘The Greatest Paper in the World’, Thames Television, broadcast 2 January 1985.

105. Evans to Murdoch, 3 December 1981, Evans Day File.

106. Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.

107. TNL News, April 1981; Murdoch’s report to the TNL board, 9 June 1981.

108. TNL News, April 1981.

109. Ibid., July 1981.

110. Marmaduke Hussey, memorandum, 9 December 1974, Grigg Papers.

111. TNL News, September 1984.

112. Evans to Bill O’Neill, 20 October 1981, Evans Day File.

113. Evans to Gerald Long, cc. Bill Gillespie, John Collier, 29 January 1982, Evans Day File.

114. Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, pp. 171–2.

115. Liz Seeber to the author, interview, 18 July 2002.

116. Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island, pp. 47–8.

117. Murdoch, quoted in the Financial Times, 30 September, and the Daily Telegraph, 29 September 1981.

118. Murdoch, quoted in The Times, 2 October 1981; TNL News, October 1981.

119. Australian Financial Review, reproduced in TNL News, November 1981.

120. Evans to Ken Beattie (TNL commercial director), 4 November 1981, Evans Day File A327/3626.

121. Evans to Ken Beattie, 21 October and 29 October 1981, Evans Day File.

122. Evans to John Higgins, 17 November 1981, Evans Day File A327/3626.

123. Alan Watkins, Spectator, 23 July 1983.

124. Evans to Bernard Levin, 2 September 1981, Evans Day File.

125. Ibid., 6 August 1981, Evans Day File.

126. Ibid., 12 November 1981, Evans Day File.

127. Evans to Michael Leapman, 11 June 1981, telex 125912.

128. Philip Howard to the author, interview, 5 December 2002.

129. Evans to Michael Leapman, 29 June 1981, Evans Day File.

130. Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.

131. Patrick Marnham, Spectator, 20 February 1982.

132. Evans to Peter Hennessy, 10 January 1092, Evans Day File A759/9329.

133. Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 293.

134. Tim Austin to the author, interview, 4 March 2003.

135. Fred Emery to the author, interview, 24 January 2005.

136. Made famous by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, quoted in Toby Young, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, p. 143n.

137. Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 329–31.

138. Gerald Long to department heads, 19 June 1981 (reissued 5 January 1982), ref. A751/9253/42.

139. Evans to Murdoch, 16 September 1981, Evans Day File, A327/3626.

140. Minutes, editorial management meeting, 4 May 1982, ref. 3629/3/4.

141. Evans to Murdoch, undated draft, January 1982, Evans Day File.

142. Ibid., 11 January 1982, Evans Day File.

143. Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 319–23.

144. Evans to Charles Douglas-Home, no date, February 1982, Evans Day File.

145. Frank Giles, Sundry Times, p. 221.

146. Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 172.

147. Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.

148. Evans to Anthony Holden, 23 November 1981, Evans Day File A327/ 3626.

149. Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 228.

150. Murdoch, personal message to all The Times and Sunday Times staff, 8 February 1982.

151. TNL News, March 1982; Evans to Gerald Long, 18 February 1982, Evans Day File.

152. Minutes of TNL directors’ meeting, 16 December 1981, ref. 6968/1; Evans to Long, 16 February 1982, Evans Day File.

153. Minutes of TNL directors’ meeting, 23 December 1981, ref. 6968/1.

154. Evans to Long, Frank Giles to Long, 16 February 1982, ref. 6968/1.

155. Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 359.

156. Peter Wilby (Father of the Sunday Times NUJ chapel) to Sir Edward Pickering, 20 February 1982.

157. Denis Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, p. 183.

158. Richard Searby to Sir Edward Pickering, 17 February 1982.

159. TNL News, March 1982.

160. The Times, 15 February 1982.

161. Ibid., February 1982.

162. Richard Searby to Sir Edward Pickering, 19 February 1982; Minutes of TNHL board meeting, 22 February 1982.

163. Spectator, 27 February 1982.

164. Evans to Murdoch, 21 and 23 February 1982. Evans Day File.

165. Evans to Willie Landels, 24 September 1981, Evans Day File A327/3626.

166. Evans to Elwyn Parry Jones (producer, Panorama), 2 March 1982, Evans Day File A759/9329.

167. 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.

168. Richard Ingrams, Spectator, 5 November 1983.

169. Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.

170. Quoted in Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 222.

171. Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 228.

172. Ibid., p. 229.

173. Bernard Donoughue, The Heat of the Kitchen, p. 286.

174. 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.

175. Owen Hickey to Rees-Mogg, 13 November and 23 December 1980.

176. Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 8 November 2004; Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.

177. Donoughue, The Heat of the Kitchen, pp. 288–9.

178. Spectator, 5 November 1983.

179. Frank Johnson to the author, interview, 15 January 2003.

180. Liz Seeber to the author, interview, 18 July 2003.

181. Philip Howard to the author, interview, 5 December 2002.

182. Hussey, Chance Governs All, p. 179.

183. Evans to Murdoch, 21 February 1982, Evans Day File.

184. Ibid., 23 February 1982, Evans Day File.

185. Ibid., 11 March 1982, Evans Day File.

186. Enoch Powell, The Times, 10 March 1982.

187. Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 369.

188. Ibid., p. 377.

189. The Times, 12 March 1982.

190. ‘The Deeper Issues’, leading article, The Times, 12 March 1982.

191. The Times, 13 March 1982.

192. Leapman, Barefaced Cheek, p. 235; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 393–4.

193. Tim Austin to the author, interview, 4 March 2003; Fred Emery to the author, interview, 24 January 2005.

194. ‘The Greatest Paper in the World’, Thames Television, broadcast 2 January 1985.

195. Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.

196. Private Eye, 26 March 1982.

197. Douglas-Home to Michael Leapman, 11 November 1983, Douglas-Home Papers.

198. Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 177–8.

199. Evans to the author, interview, 25 June 2003.

200. Ibid.; Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, pp. 1–2.

201. The Times, 17 and 18 September 1981.

202. Harold Evans to the author, interview, 25 June 2003.

203. Lord Parkinson to the author, 2 July 2004.

204. Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 5 August 2003.

205. Donoughue, The Heat of the Kitchen, p. 288.

206. Evans to the author, interview, 25 June 2003.

207. Notes of discussion between Alastair Hetherington and Douglas-Home, 31 October 1983, Douglas-Home Papers.

208. Richard Searby to the author, interview, 11 June 2002; similarly rendered in Rupert Murdoch’s interview with the author, 4 August 2003.

209. Bill O’Neill, Copy Out manuscript.

210. Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 312.

211. Evans to the author, interview, 25 June 2003.

212. Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.

213. Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.

214. Rees-Mogg, ‘The Greatest Paper in the World’, Thames Television, broadcast 2 January 1985.

215. Anthony Holden to the author, interview, 9 April 2003.

216. Sunday Times, 14 March 1982.

217. Tony Norbury to the author, interview, 27 April 2004.

218. Quoted in Donoughue, The Heat of the Kitchen, p. 287.

219. Patrick Marnham, Spectator, 20 February, 1982.

220. Paul Johnson, Spectator, 20 March 1982.

221. Philip Howard, ‘The Greatest Paper in the World’, Thames Television, broadcast 2 January 1985.

222. Evans to Frank Johnson, 12 March 1982, Evans Day File.

223. Frank Johnson to the author, interview, 15 January 2003.

CHAPTER THREE: COLD WARRIOR (PP. 119–166)

1. John Grigg, The History of The Times, vol. VI: The Thomson Years, p. 549.

2. From Lord Shackleton and others, letters to the editor, The Times, 4 February 1982.

3. The Times, 23 March 1982.

4. Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister, p. 413.

5. ‘Gunboat or Burglar Alarm?’, leading article, The Times, 29 March 1982.

6. Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie, Stick It Up Your Punter, pp. 128–31.

7. Bernard Ingham, Kill The Messenger, p. 285.

8. 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.

9. Guardian, 11 July 1988; Miles Hudson and John Stanier, War and the Media: A Random Searchlight, p. 169.

10. Hudson and Stanier, War and the Media, p. 170.

11. ‘Naked Aggression’, leading article, The Times, 3 April 1982.

12. ‘We Are All Falklanders Now’, leading article, The Times, 5 April 1982.

13. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 186.

14. The Times, 14 April 1982.

15. Ibid., 20 May 1982.

16. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 181.

17. Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands, p. 161.

18. Fred Emery to Charles Douglas-Home, 29 April 1982, ref. A751/9256/9/2.

19. The advertisement was sponsored by a group describing themselves as Argentine citizens residing in New York State, The Times, 24 April 1982.

20. E. P Thompson, ‘Why Neither Side Is Worth Backing’, The Times, 29 April 1982.

21. Lord Wigg, letters to the editor, The Times, 6 April 1982.

22. Leon Pilpel in TNL News, May 1982.

23. Frank Giles, Sundry Times, p. 224.

24. David Kynaston, The Financial Times: A Centenary History, pp. 463–6.

25. Taylor, Changing Faces, pp. 228–33, 234–5.

26. New Statesman, ‘Mad Margaret and the Voyage of Dishonour’, 9 April 1982; New Statesman, 30 April 1982.

27. Chippindale and Horrie, Stick It Up Your Punter, p. 136.

28. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, pp. 205–8, 211.

29. Liz Seeber to the author, interview, 18 July 2002.

30. The Economist, 22 May 1982.

31. John Witherow to the author, interview, 9 August 2002.

32. 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.

33. 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.

34. Robert Harris, Gotcha! The Media, The Government and the Falklands Crisis, pp. 35–6.

35. Emery to Douglas-Home, 18 May 1982, ref. A751/9256/9/2.

36. John Witherow to the author, interview, 9 August 2002.

37. Ibid.

38. The Times, 4 May 1982.

39. Chippindale and Horrie, Stick It Up Your Punter, p. 137.

40. ‘For a Better Peace’, leading article, The Times, 5 May 1982.

41. The Times, 5 May 1982.

42. Ibid., 7 May 1982.

43. Peter Kellner, New Statesman, 7 May 1982.

44. Professor Bernard Crick, letters to the editor, The Times, 6 May 1982.

45. ‘You Cannot Joke With War’, leading article, The Times, 12 May 1982.

46. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, pp. 216, 221; The Times, 5 May 1982.

47. Nigel Lawson, The View From No. 11, pp. 126–7.

48. Harris, Gotcha!, p. 111.

49. John Witherow to the author, interview, 9 August 2002.

50. Hudson and Stanier, War and the Media, p. 175.

51. Fred Emery to Charles Douglas-Home, ref. A751/9256/9/2.

52. Hudson and Stanier, War and the Media, p. 173.

53. The Times, 11 June 1982.

54. Ibid., 12 June 1982.

55. Ibid., 10 June 1982.

56. Hastings and Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands, pp. 320–21.

57. Quoted in Harris, Gotcha!, p. 118.

58. Hastings and Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands, p. 349.

59. ‘The Truce’, leading article, The Times, 15 June 1982.

60. John Witherow and Patrick Bishop, The Winter War, p. 17.

61. Ibid., pp. 18, 26.

62. Harris, Gotcha!, p. 56.

63. Hudson and Stanier, War and the Media, p. 178.

64. Robert Kee, letters to the editor, The Times, 14 May 1982.

65. Taylor, Changing Faces, p. 237.

66. Address by Edward Cazalet at Charles Douglas-Home’s Memorial Service, 25 November 1985.

67. Jessica Douglas-Home, Once Upon Another Time, p. 11.

68. The Times, 22 October 1982.

69. Ibid., 19 September 1981.

70. Ibid., 17 December 1981.

71. ‘Can We Help Poland?’, leading article, The Times, 23 September 1981; ‘What the West Should Do’, leading article, The Times, 17 December 1981.

72. Harold Evans to Rupert Murdoch, 17 January 1982, Evans Day File A759/ 9329.

73. The Times, 13 August 1982.

74. ‘Trade Across the Curtain’, leading article, The Times, 16 November 1982.

75. Michael Binyon, quoted in TNL News, September 1982.

76. The Times, 12 November 1982.

77. ‘Enter Mr Andropov’, leading article, The Times, 13 November 1982.

78. ‘The Morality of Deterrence’, leading article, The Times, 19 October 1982.

79. Harold Evans to Owen Hickey, Richard Owen, Brian Horton, 5 November 1981, Evans Day File; Harold Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p. 237.

80. ‘Lebanon for the Lebanese’, leading article, The Times, 14 June 1982.

81. ‘Israel’s Pre-Emptive Strike’, leading article, The Times, 9 June 1981.

82. Robert Fisk to the author, interview, 21 September 2004.

83. TNL News, March 1983.

84. Robert Fisk to the author, interview, 21 September 2004; Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation, pp. 183–7.

85. Telegram from Robert Fisk, 25 February 1982, HME 1/19.

86. Brian Horton to Harold Evans, 5 March 1982, HME 1/19.

87. Fisk, Pity the Nation, pp. 183–7.

88. ‘The Best Assad We Have’, leading article, The Times, 15 February 1982.

89. ‘Israel Erupts’, leading article, The Times, 8 June 1982; ‘An Unbalanced Policy’, leading article, The Times, 10 June 1982.

90. ‘An Unbalanced Policy’, leading article, The Times, 10 June 1982.

91. The Times, 8 June 1982.

92. Ibid., 15 June 1982.

93. Edward Mortimer, ‘Why the West should fear the shame of the Arabs’, The Times, 8 June 1982.

94. The Times, 20 September 1982.

95. ‘After the Massacre’, leading article, The Times, 20 September 1982.

96. Ibid.

97. Brenda Dean to all Fathers of chapel working under NPA Agreement, 25 June 1982, 6985/21.

98. ‘An Unlawful Interruption’, leading article, The Times, 12 August 1982.

99. ‘All Our Tomorrows’, leading article, The Times, 3 January 1983.

100. Hugo Young to Douglas-Home, 16 February 1985, Douglas-Home Papers.

101. Douglas-Home/Clare Short correspondence, 26 March and 2 April 1985, Douglas-Home Papers.

102. Peter Stothard to Douglas-Home, 13 April 1983, Douglas-Home Papers.

103. Seth Lipsky, ‘Welcome Back Thunderer’, Wall Street Journal, 14 November 1985.

104. Leading article, Spectator, 2 November 1985.

105. The Times, 4 March 1993.

106. Richard Davy to the author, 2 January 2005.

107. ‘Not the Age of The Times’, New Statesman, 11 January 1985.

108. Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, August 2003. Other accounts render the expletive variously.

109. ‘The International Framework’, leading article, The Times, 11 February 1983.

110. ‘Beyond the Budget’, leading article, The Times, 8 February 1983.

111. Graham Searjeant to the author, interview, 11 January 2005.

112. Lawson, The View From No. 11, p. 208.

113. ‘The Pains of Privatisation’, leading article, The Times, 22 November 1982.

114. ‘Selling at a Discount’, leading article, The Times, 28 October 1982.

115. ‘The Love that Labour Lost’, leading article, The Times, 6 June 1983.

116. The New Hope for Britain, Labour Party 1983 general election manifesto.

117. The Times, 1 December 1982.

118. ‘All Their Tomorrows’, leading article, The Times, 8 June 1983.

119. Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party, p. 498.

120. Giles, Sundry Times, p. 230.

121. The Times, 3 October 1983.

122. Michael Foot to Douglas-Home, 15 September 1983, Douglas-Home Papers.

123. Leading article, The Times, 7 October 1983.

124. Graham Paterson to the author, interview, 18 September 2002.

125. 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).

126. Douglas-Home to Alastair Hetherington, undated, Douglas-Home Papers.

127. The Times, letters to the editor, 15 October 1983; W. F. Deedes, Dear Bill, p. 283.

CHAPTER FOUR: ANCIENT AND MODERN (PP. 167–218)

1. Sunday Times, 1 May 1983; Robert Harris, Selling Hitler, pp. 234–6.

2. Colin Webb to the author, interview, 20 February 2003.

3. Lord Dacre to Graham Turner, interview, Daily Telegraph, 28 January 2003. He made similar claims to Frank Giles: Frank Giles, Sundry Times, pp. 245–6.

4. These were the exact words Douglas-Home told Webb that Dacre had used when Webb – away on holiday – spoke to the editor by telephone the following day. Colin Webb to the author, interview, 20 February 2003.

5. Harris, Selling Hitler, pp. 261–5.

6. Michael Binyon to the author, interview, 25 November 2002.

7. Harris, Selling Hitler, pp. 284–7.

8. Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 5 August 2003.

9. Harris, Selling Hitler, pp. 288–91, 302–3.

10. Michael Binyon to the author, interview, 25 November 2002.

11. The Times, 23 April 1983.

12. Harris, Selling Hitler, pp. 306–7.

13. Michael Binyon to the author, interview, 25 November 2002.

14. Colin Webb to the author, interview, 20 February 2003.

15. Harris, Selling Hitler, p. 314.

16. Sunday Times, 24 April 1983.

17. Frank Giles, Sundry Times, pp. 243–4.

18. Robert Fisk to the author, interview, 21 September 2004.

19. Sunday Times, 1 May 1983; Harris, Selling Hitler, pp. 316–18.

20. Michael Binyon to the author, interview, 23 April 2004.

21. Lord Dacre to Charles Douglas-Home, 22 August 1984, Douglas-Home Papers.

22. Harris, Selling Hitler, pp. 321–3; The Times, 26 April 1983.

23. Letters to the editor, The Times, 26–28 April 1983.

24. Charles Wilson to the author, interview, 19 February 2004; Robert Fisk, also in the room at the time, recalled Murdoch saying ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’. Robert Fisk to the author, interview, 21 September 2004; Webb found Murdoch equally relaxed at this time: Colin Webb to the author, interview, 20 February 2004.

25. Lord Dacre to Graham Turner, interview, Daily Telegraph, 28 January 2003.

26. The Times, 27 January 2003.

27. Tim Austin to the author, interview, 4 March 2003.

28. Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 5 August 2003.

29. The Times, 29 November 1984.

30. Irving Wardle to the author, 10 June 2004.

31. The Times, 3 May 1985.

32. Ibid., 12 May 1981.

33. Independent on Sunday, 12 May 2002.

34. The Times, 3 January 1985.

35. Ibid., 11 April 1986.

36. Ibid., 1 and 3 November 1982.

37. Douglas-Home to Lord Dacre, 25 April 1985, Douglas-Home Papers.

38. The Times, 19 June 1985.

39. Guardian, 13 September 1985.

40. Charles Douglas-Home to Paul Routledge, 26 October 1984, Routledge Papers; Paul Routledge to the author, interview, 22 June 2004.

41. Daily Express, 3 April 1984; Alastair Brett (Times Senior Legal Assistant) to Sir Larry Lamb, 3 April 1984, Routledge Papers.

42. For example, Paul Johnson and (the far from pro-Murdoch) Charles Moore in Spectator, 5 and 12 November 1983.

43. The Times, 3 November 1983.

44. Harold Evans to Rupert Murdoch, 29 July 1981, Evans Day File A327/ 3625.

45. TNL News, July 1984.

46. The Times, 26 June 1984.

47. Geoffrey Taylor, Changing Faces: History of The Guardian, 1956–1988, p. 312.

48. TNL News, December 1984.

49. Ibid., April and June 1982; Observer, 13 July 1986.

50. Minutes of Times Editorial Management Meeting, 2 June 1982, ref. 3629/3/4.

51. Charles Douglas-Home to Murray Hedgcock, 14 September 1982; Minutes of Times Editorial Management Meeting, 29 June 1982, ref. 3629/3/4.

52. The Times, 27 January 1982, 19 January 1983; see also Hugo Young, Listener, 3 January 1985.

53. Charles Douglas-Home to Sir Edward Pickering, 3 March 1983, ref. A751/9256/13.

54. Minutes of Times Editorial Management meeting, 29 June 1982, ref. 3629/3/4.

55. For example, Emery to Douglas-Home, 6 April and 24 May 1982, and undated memoranda, ref. A751/9256/9/2.

56. Colin Webb to the author, interview, 20 February 2003.

57. Charles Wilson to the author, interview, 19 February 2004.

58. Minutes of Times Editorial Management meeting, 2 June 1982, ref. 3629/ 3/4.

59. The Times, 4 June 1982; memo, ref. 3629/3/18.

60. Douglas-Home to Fred Emery, 21 June 1982, ref. A751/9256.

61. Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) to Douglas-Home, 9 August 1985.

62. Ranan Lurie to Douglas-Home, 17 April 1982, ref. 3629/3/10.

63. The Times, 12 February 1994.

64. Liz Seeber to the author, interview, 18 July 2002.

65. Simon Barnes to the author, interview, 25 January 2005.

66. The Times, 3 and 18 August 1981.

67. Ibid., 23 June 1981; see Richard Evans, John McEnroe: Taming the Talent.

68. Ibid., 17 June 1982.

69. Ibid., 6 and 12 July 1982.

70. The Greatest Paper in the World!, Thames Television, broadcast 2 January 1985.

71. TNL News, March 1985.

72. Douglas-Home to various correspondents, March 1985, ref. 1749/9248/2; Paul Routledge to the author, interview, 22 June 2004.

73. Sir Edward Pickering to the author, interview, 15 January 2002.

74. Jessica Douglas-Home, No End of a Lesson, p. 13.

75. ‘The Nativity’, leading article (by Douglas-Home), The Times, 24 December 1984.

76. The correspondence, consulted for this volume, is in the care of Jessica Douglas-Home.

77. Charles Wilson to the author, interview, 19 February 2004.

78. TNL News, November 1985; letters in the possession of Jessica Douglas-Home.

79. Spectator, 2 November 1985.

80. TNL News, December 1985.

81. Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 5 August 2003.

82. TNL News, November 1985.

83. ‘The Way the Wind Blow’, leading article, New Statesman, 19 March 1982.

84. See Iverach McDonald, The History of The Times, vol. V: Struggles in War and Peace, 1939–1966, pp. 104–8, 133–41.

85. ‘Far from their Flock’, leading article (by Douglas-Home), The Times, 27 March 1985.

86. Independent, 9 March 1998.

87. Charles Wilson to the author, interview, 19 February 2004.

88. Quoted in William Shawcross, Murdoch, pp. 214–15.

89. Liz Seeber to the author, interview, 18 July 2002.

CHAPTER FIVE: FORTRESS WAPPING (PP. 219–252)

1. News International statistics, presented by Michael Burton QC in the High Court, 10 February 1986.

2. Duff Hart-Davis, The House the Berrys Built: Inside the Telegraph, 1928–1986, p. 278.

3. David Kynaston, The Financial Times: A Centenary History, pp. 475–81.

4. Suellen Littleton, The Wapping Dispute: An Examination of the Conflict and its Impact on the National Newspaper Industry, p. 18.

5. Littleton, The Wapping Dispute, pp. 13–14, 17.

6. Peter Stothard, The Times, 26 January 1996.

7. Kynaston, The Financial Time, p. 481.

8. Bill O’Neill, Copy Out manuscript.

9. Ref. 10030/1.

10. Ibid.

11. Tony Isaacs (Imperial Father, News of the World machine chapel) to Bill O’Neill, June 1983, quoted in Sarah Benton and Mark Hollingsworth, ‘A Plot Conceived and Planned Six Years Ago’, New Statesman, 6 February 1986.

12. Bill O’Neill to N. F. Robbins (deputy secretary, NGA London region), 28 November 1983; N. F. Robbins to Bruce Matthews, 9 November 1983, ref. 10030/1.

13. Littleton, The Wapping Dispute, p. 59.

14. Ibid.

15. Bill O’ Neill, memorandum, 13 February 1984, ref. 10030/1.

16. Quoted in O’Neill, Copy Out.

17. Sunday Times, 6 April 1986. See O’Neill, Copy Out.

18. G. H. Willoughby (SOGAT London Central branch secretary), 14 June 1982, 6984/21.

19. E. R. Chard (SOGAT London Central branch secretary) to Bill Gillespie, September 1984, ref. 6985/21.

20. Andrew Neil, Full Disclosure, pp. 76–8.

21. Littleton, The Wapping Dispute, pp. 33–4.

22. Charles Wilson to the author, interview, 19 February 2004.

23. Bill O’Neill to the author, 1 October 2002.

24. Baroness Dean to the author, interview, 1 April 2003.

25. Quoted in Charles Wintour, The Rise and Fall of Fleet Street, p. 219.

26. Quoted by Charles Wilson, speech to the Guild of Newspaper Editors, 8 May 1987.

27. Neil, Full Disclosure, p. 102.

28. Richard Searby to the author, conversation, 11 June 2002; Jenkins, Market for Glory: Fleet Street Ownership in the Twentieth Century, p. 194; Neil, Full Disclosure, pp. 97–8, 101.

29. Tim Austin to the author, interview, 4 March 2003.

30. Linda Melvern, The End of the Street, pp. 221–32; Littleton, The Wapping Dispute p. 66.

31. Brenda Dean, statement, 30 August 1985.

32. Charles Wilson to the author, interview, 19 February 2004.

33. Baroness Dean to the author, interview, 1 April 2003.

34. Donald Reed, The Power of News: The History of Reuters, pp. 412–14, 427, 432–5; John Lawrenson and Lionel Barber, The Price of Truth, p. 27; Denis Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, pp. 185, 187; David Kynaston, The Financial Times, p. 500; Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003; Geoffrey Taylor, Changing Faces: A History of the Guardian, 1956–1988, p. 298; S. J. Taylor, An Unlikely Hero, p. 209–10.

35. Roy Greenslade, Press Gang, pp. 401–2; Jenkins, Market for Glory, pp. 176–7.

36. Eric Hammond, Maverick, p. 77; Jenkins, Market for Glory, pp. 187–90; Littleton, The Wapping Dispute, pp 35–6.

37. Hart-Davis, The House the Berrys Built, pp. 292–327; Greenslade, Press Gang, pp. 409–14.

38. Baroness Dean to the author, interview, 1 April 2003.

39. Brenda Dean, quoted in Melvern, The End of the Street, p. 176.

40. The Times, 1 October 1985.

41. Rupert Murdoch, statement, The Times, 1 October 1985.

42. O’Neill, Copy Out.

43. Bill O’Neill to the author, 1 October 2002.

44. Hammond, Maverick, pp. 84–5; The Times, 11 December 1985.

45. Minutes of the TUC Printing Industries Committee, 9 December 1985.

46. H. W. Miles to Bruce Matthews, 23 December 1985, file 6985/21.

47. Baroness Dean to the author, interview, 1 April 2003.

48. Tim Austin to the author, interview, 4 March 2003.

49. Colin Webb to the author, interview, 20 February 2002.

50. Minutes of the TNHL board, 10 December 1985, ref. A909/11192/2. The minutes make just one Delphic reference that ‘the Chairman referred briefly to proposed greenfield operations at the new printing plant of News International plc at Wapping’.

51. Sadly, Matthews took his reasoning to the grave; Andrew Knight to the author, interview, 2 December 2004.

52. Wyatt diary; Geoffrey Richards to Bill Gillespie, 13 January 1986, ref. 10030/2; London Sogat Post, February 1986; The Times, 13 January 1986; Sunday Times 19 January 1986; Neil, Full Disclosure, p. 109.

53. The Times, 11, 15 and 16 January 1986; Littleton, The Wapping Dispute, p. 80.

54. Bill O’Neill to the author, 1 October 2002.

55. The Times, 22 January 1986.

56. Ibid., 22 January 1986.

57. Ibid., 24 January 1986.

58. London Sogat Post, February 1986.

59. Colin Webb to the author, interview, 20 February 2003.

60. The Times, 26 January 1996.

61. Colin Webb to the author, interview, 20 February 2003.

62. Charles Wilson to Times staff, notes taken by Martin Huckerby, quoted in Melvern, The End of the Street, pp. 81–2.

63. Melvern, The End of the Street, p. 85.

64. Liz Seeber to the author, interview, 18 July 2002.

CHAPTER SIX: FIFTY-FOUR WEEKS UNDER SIEGE (PP. 253–299)

1. David Kynaston, The Financial Times: A Centenary History, p. 500.

2. Sun staff voted 101 to 8 in favour; News of the World staff voted 43 to 2.

3. Quoted in Linda Melvern, The End of the Street, p. 89.

4. Peter Brown to the author, interview, 27 April 2004.

5. Spectator.

6. Financial Times, 27 January 1986; New Statesman, 6 February 1986; Melvern, The End of the Street, pp. 86–9.

7. Financial Times, 27 February 1986; The Times, 27 January 1986; Campaign, 11 September 1987; Melvern, The End of the Street, pp. 155–6.

8. Melvern, The End of the Street, pp. 90–94.

9. Charles Wilson to the Guild of Newspaper Editors, 8 May 1987.

10. Tim Austin to the author, interview, 4 March 2003.

11. Philip Howard to the author, interview, 5 December 2002; Charles Wilson to the author, interview, 19 February 2004; New Statesman, 6 February 1986.

12. The Times, 26 January 1996.

13. Ibid., 5 February, 1986.

14. Suellen Littleton, The Wapping Dispute: An Examination of the Conflict and its Impact on the National Newspaper Industry, p. 80; ref. B067/12503/ 9; Journalist NUJ newspaper, February 1986, vol. 69, no. 2; Charles Wilson to Times staff, 13 June 1986, B067/12503/7.

15. There were eight refuseniks – Barrie Clement, Dave Felton, Paul Griffiths, Pat Healy, Don McIntyre, Greg Neale, Paul Routledge and Pam Spooner. In addition, Derek Pain resigned and Martin Huckerby was dismissed.

16. ‘Citizen Murdoch,’ Panorama, BBC TV, 19 January 1987; News International in-house Wapping production video, 30 April 1987.

17. Liz Seeber to the author, interview, 18 July 2002.

18. Rupert Murdoch to all staff, 3 February 1986, ref. 10030/2.

19. William Rees-Mogg, letter to the editor, The Times, 30 January 1986; Rees-Mogg was no less supportive in private: William Rees-Mogg to Charles Wilson, 24 April 1986, A749/9242/J; Spectator; Denis Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, p. 184; Bernard Levin, The Times, 3 February 1986; Harold Evans to the author, interview, 25 June 2003.

20. The Times, 3 February 1986; Financial Times, 3 February 1986; Guardian, 3 February 1986.

21. Alan Hamilton to the author, interview, 29 April 2004.

22. Chris Warman to the author, interview, 29 April 2004.

23. Tim Austin to the author, interview, 4 March 2003; O’Neill, Copy Out manuscript; Spectator.

24. The Times, 29 January 1986; Eric Hammond, Maverick, p. 90–91.

25. Hammond, Maverick, pp. 93–4.

26. Sunday Times, 16 February 1986.

27. Paul Routledge to the author, 22 June 2004.

28. Peter Kellner to the author, 4 March 2003; Guardian, 12 and 17 February 1986; critics included Murdoch’s fault-finders from the right: Charles Moore in the Spectator.

29. The Times, 4 March 1986; minutes of the TNHL board, 9 December 1986, ref. A909/11192/2.

30. The Times, 20 June 1986.

31. Times Law Report, 6 November 1986.

32. The Times, 18 and 20 March 1987.

33. Ken Clarke to the Parliamentary Press Gallery, 12 February 1986, quoted in The Times, 15 February 1986; The Times, 14, 18 and 21 February, 14, 15 and 27 March 1986.

34. Neil Kinnock to the SOGAT conference at Scarborough, Today, 12 June 1986.

35. Brenda Dean to SOGAT members, May 1986, B067/12503/2; however, the International Graphical Federation (to which forty-three print unions were affiliated worldwide) did call on its member not to handle any News International print work that might be attempted abroad. This proved a needless precaution: Financial Times, 18 February 1986.

36. Under Section 17 of the 1980 Employment Act; Guardian, 11 February 1986.

37. Guardian and the Financial Times, 11 February 1986.

38. Baroness Dean to the author, interview, 1 April 2003.

39. The Times, 10 February 1986, ‘Citizen Murdoch’, Panorama, BBC TV, 19 January 1987.

40. ‘Using the Law’, leading article, The Times, 19 February 1986.

41. The Times, 11 February, 20 February 1986.

42. The Times, 22 February 1986; Littleton, The Wapping Dispute, p. 92; The Sunday Times, 2 March 1986.

43. Financial Times, 21 April 1986; Guardian, 22 April 1986.

44. Guardian, 21 March 1986.

45. Brenda Dean to members, May 1986, ref. B067/12503/2; Littleton, The Wapping Dispute, p. 116.

46. See for example, Wapping Post, 7 June 1986.

47. Market research by ARC/Everett, results circulated on 24 April 1986 on the basis of telephoning 750 nationally representative individuals.

48. ABC Figures suggested the Sunday Times’s circulation had fallen by 200,000 between January and April 1986; Neil, Full Disclosure, p. 149.

49. Charles Wilson to Times staff, 13 June 1986, B067/12503/7.

50. Spectator, 1 March 1986.

51. Spectator.

52. Sunday Times, 9 March 1986.

53. Charles Wilson to the author, interview, 19 February 2004.

54. The Times, 18 March 1986.

55. Sunday Times, 6 April 1986.

56. ‘A Very Dangerous Error’, leading article, The Times, 8 April 1986.

57. Sunday Times, 23 February 1986; The Times, 2 May 1986.

58. The Times, 27 February, 12 March 1986 and 13 February 1987.

59. David Selbourne’s offending article, ‘No Muzzling Militant’, was published in The Times on 26 March 1986; Guardian, 14 October 1986; The Times 23 October 1986; leading articles, ‘The Selbourne Affair’, 16 October 1986, ‘A Non-Academic Inquiry’, 17 March 1987, ‘Verdict on Ruskin’, 7 October 1987, The Times.

60. ‘The Reputation of Journalism’, leading article, The Times, 22 April 1986.

61. D. P. Forbes, letters to the editor, The Times, 27 February 1986.

62. Minutes of meeting between News International and union representatives, Mayfair Hotel, 4 April 1986, ref. B067/12503; The Times, 5 April 1986.

63. Sunday Today, 6 April 1986.

64. The Times, 7 April 1986.

65. Minutes of meeting between News International and union representatives, Hyde Park Hotel, 16 April 1986, ref. B067/12503; Financial Times, 17 April 1986.

66. Rupert Murdoch to Bruce Matthews, 29 April 1986, ref. B067/12503/3.

67. The Times, 5 and 7 May 1986.

68. ‘When the Police Face Riots’, leading article, The Times, 5 May 1986.

69. The Times, 14 and 22 May 1986.

70. Baroness Dean to the author, interview, 1 April 2003.

71. Neil, Full Disclosure, pp. 152–3.

72. Minutes of meeting held between News International and union executives at the Sheraton Skyline Hotel, Heathrow, 26 May 1986, ref. B067/12503/5.

73. The Times, 27 May 1986.

74. Ibid., 5 June 1986.

75. Simon Jenkins, The Market for Glory: Fleet Street Ownership in the Twentieth Century, p. 203.

76. The Times, 7 June 1986; Sunday Times, 8 June 1986.

77. The Times, 4 and 5 June 1986; Guardian, 4 June 1986.

78. Hammond, Maverick, pp. 95, 97–8.

79. Neil, Full Disclosure, pp. 134–9.

80. Marmaduke Hussey to John Collier, 18 July 1986, ref. B067/12503/2; Marmaduke Hussey, Chance Governs All, p. 193.

81. The Times, 21 June, 26 June, 7 July 1986.

82. Today and The Times, 10 June 1986; Baroness Dean to the author, interview, 1 April 2003.

83. The Times NUJ chapel, 1986 – Claim for Renewal of House Agreement; minutes of meeting with Mike Hoy, Times chapel meeting, 17 March and 14 April 1986.

84. Charles Wilson to Times staff, 13 June 1986, ref. B067/12503/7.

85. Minutes of meeting with Mike Hoy (managing editor) and The Times NUJ chapel, 12 June 1986, ref. B067/12503/7.

86. The Times, 9 September 1986; Guardian, 13 September 1986.

87. The Times, 1 August 1986.

88. Ibid., 2 August 1986.

89. Danny Sergeant (SOGAT general president) to London branch leaders, 18 August 1986, ref. A909/1193/2.

90. Minutes of meetings between News International and union representatives at the Copthorne Hotel, Gatwick, 22 and 29 August, 7 September 1986, ref. B067/12503/2.

91. Littleton, The Wapping Dispute, p. 114.

92. Minutes of TNL Executive meeting, 22 October 1986, ref. B067/12503.

93. Guardian, 14 January 1987.

94. Ibid., 26 April 1986.

95. Details from security camera footage, ref. 10030/5; The Times, 26 January 1987.

96. Neil, Full Disclosure, p. 140.

97. The Times, 26 January 1987.

98. Guardian, 27 January 1987.

99. O’Neill, Copy Out manuscript.

100. Littleton, p. 120; The Times, 6 February 1987; SOGAT Press Release, 5 February 1987, ref. 10030/5; O’Neill, Copy Out.

101. ‘Hard Lessons of Wapping’; leading article, The Times, 6 February 1987.

102. Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 5 August 2003; Charles Wilson to the author, interview, 12 February 2004.

103. Tony Norbury to the author, interview, 27 April 2004.

104. Littleton, The Wapping Dispute, p. 135.

105. Kenneth Clarke on Channel 4 News, quoted in The Times, 7 February 1987.

106. Hammond, Maverick, p. 79.

107. The Times, 12 January 1987; Guardian, 21 January 1987; Financial Times, 16 February 1987.

108. The Times, 10 October 1990.

109. This decision was reversed at the Daily Telegraph in 2003 and at the Independent in 2001.

110. Guardian, 5 June 2000.

111. Charles Wilson to the Guild of Newspaper Editors, 8 May 1987.

112. David Flynn to Charles Wilson, 3 April 1986, ref. 9841/5.

113. Rupert Murdoch in British Journalism Review, vol. 10, no. 4, 1999.

114. Times Newspapers Holdings Board, Report, 7 June 1988, ref. A909/ 11192/2.

115. Littleton, The Wapping Dispute, p. 134.

116. Estimate in UK Press Gazette, cited in Jenkins, Market for Glory, p. 203.

117. Neil Chenoweth, Virtual Murdoch: Reality Wars on the Information Highway, p. 63.

118. Estimate by John Reidy, vice-president of Drexell Burnham Lambert Bank, interview with Robert Harris, broadcast on Panorama, BBC TV, 19 January 1987.

119. Peter Chernin, speech of 21 June 2002, quoted in O’Neill, Copy Out.

120. Hugo Young in Guardian, 2 September 1993.

121. Bill Pressey, production general manager, Associated Newspapers, quoted in S. J. Taylor, An Unlikely Hero, p. 246.

122. The Times, 10 July 1986.

123. Ivan Fallon to the ‘UK Newspapers: Declining Medium or Growth Opportunity’ conference organized by ABN Amro, London, 30 April 2004.

CHAPTER SEVEN: INDEPENDENT CHALLENGES (PP. 300–331)

1. Stephen Glover, Paper Dreams, p. 33.

2. David Kynaston, The Financial Times: A Centenary History, p. 501.

3. Charles Wilson to the author, interview, 19 February 2004.

4. UK Press Gazette, 23 June 1986.

5. Ibid., 19 May 1986.

6. Charles Wilson to Paul Routledge, 6 June 1986, Routledge Papers.

7. Charles Wilson to the author, interview, 24 February 2004.

8. Philip Howard to the author, interview, 5 December 2002.

9. Charles Wilson to the author, interview, 24 February 2004.

10. Financial Times, 25 September 1986.

11. Geoffrey Taylor, Changing Faces: History of The Guardian, 1956–1988, pp. 328–9.

12. Report to the Board of Times Newspapers Holdings Limited, 9 December 1986, ref. A909/11192/2.

13. Charles Wilson to the author, interview, 24 February 2004.

14. Campaign, 30 October 1987.

15. The Times, 16 December 1985.

16. ‘Our Privilege’, leading article, The Times, 22 May 1986.

17. ‘First Report from the Committee of Privileges, Session 1985–86’, House of Commons, 1 May 1986.

18. The Cabinet ministers were Kenneth Baker, Kenneth Clarke, Nicholas Ridley and Paul Channon. Two Cabinet minister voted in favour of the ban. Forty-one ‘Government payroll’ MPs voted for The Times and only fifteen for the ban.

19. ‘Atticus’, Sunday Times, 25 May 1986.

20. ‘The Prime Minister’s Task’, leading article, The Times, 27 January 1986.

21. ‘Mr Heseltine’s Joystick’, leading article, The Times, 7 January 1986.

22. Michael Heseltine, Life in the Jungle, p. 311.

23. ‘A Very Good Resignation’, leading article, The Times, 10 January 1986.

24. ‘Excesses of Loyalty’ and ‘The Prime Minister’s Task’, leading articles, The Times, 24 and 27 January 1986.

25. Robin Oakley, Inside Track, pp. 118–21.

26. Robin Oakley to Simon Jenkins, no date but c. 1990, ref. 13262/6.

27. ‘A Campaign Lesson’, leading article, The Times, 10 June 1987; Peregrine Worsthorne, letters to the editor, The Times, 12 June 1987.

28. The Times, 12 May 1987.

29. Ibid., 31 December 1987.

30. Robin Oakley, Inside Track, pp. 139–41.

31. Brian MacArthur, Sunday Times, 23 August 1987; Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP, p. 498.

32. The Times, 12 June 1987.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., 29 December 1987.

35. Charles Wilson to the author, interview, 19 February 2004.

36. Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 5 August 2003.

37. Robin Oakley, Inside Track, pp. 237–8.

38. The Times, 20 October 1987.

39. Ibid., 22 March 1991.

40. Graham Searjeant to the author, interview, 11 January 2005.

41. Christopher Warman to the author, interview, 13 October 2004.

42. The Times, 20 October 1987.

43. Ibid., 3 January 1983.

44. Ibid., 28 August 1995.

45. Ibid., 5 December 1995.

46. Ibid., 10 February 1987.

47. Dan Topolski, letters to the editor, The Times, 20 February 2004.

48. The Times, 30 March 1987.

49. Ibid., 3 October 1988.

50. The Times, 20 September 2003; John Goodbody to the author, interview, 22 November 2004.

51. The Times, 27 and 28 May and 18 and 24 September 1987.

52. Ibid., 22 September 1998.

53. Ibid., 3 October 1988.

CHAPTER EIGHT: STURM UND DRANG (PP. 332–366)

1. Robert Fisk on The Times at two hundred, BBC TV.

2. Robert Fisk to the author, interview, 21 September 2004.

3. ‘The Case for the Raid’, leading article, The Times, 18 April 1986.

4. Robert Fisk to Charles Wilson, 11 November 1988, ref. 011846.

5. The Times, 17 March 1986.

6. Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation, p. 618.

7. Robert Fisk to the author, interview, 21 September 2004.

8. Robert Fisk to Charles Wilson, 11 November 1988, ref. 011846; ‘Beyond the Aegis’, leading article, The Times, 5 July 1988; Robert Fisk to the author, interview, 21 September 2004; Fisk, Pity the Nation, p. 635.

9. Robert Fisk, Record of meeting with Charles Wilson, 18 November 1988, Fisk Papers; ‘His Infamous Career’, leading article, The Times, 18 January 1988.

10. Max Hastings, Editor, p. 64.

11. Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 15 November 2004.

12. Richard Siklos, Shades of Black: Conrad Black and the World’s Fastest Growing Press Empire, p. 279.

13. Matthew Parris, Chance Witness, p. 369–70.

14. Ibid., pp. 371–2.

15. Matthew Parris to the author, interview, 25 January 2005.

16. ‘A Vision of Europe’, leading article, The Times, 20 September 1988.

17. The Times, 21 September 1988.

18. ‘European Thatcherism’, leading article, The Times, 21 September 1988.

19. The Times, 27 October 1989.

20. Ibid.

21. ‘Breaking Point’, leading article, The Times, 27 October 1989.

22. ‘Panic Over’, leading article, The Times, 1 November 1989.

23. The Times, 24 November 1989; Oakley, Inside Track, pp. 131–3.

24. The Times, 31 December 1988.

25. Charles Powell and Charles Wilson correspondence, 5 October 1988 and 2 March 1989; Charles Wilson to Margaret Thatcher, 27 February 1989, ref. 13262/1.

26. The Times, 14 September 1992.

27. Ibid., 5 June 1989.

28. Ibid.

29. ‘Message from the Square’, leading article, The Times, 5 June 1989.

30. The Times, 10 November 1989.

31. TNL News, March 2003.

32. The Times, 13 November 1989.

33. Ibid., 14 November 1989.

34. Ibid., 13 and 14 November 1989.

35. The Times, 3 October 1990; The Times, 2 October 1990; ‘The German Challenge’, The Times, 3 October 1990.

36. ‘Balkan Caligula’, leading article, The Times, 19 December 1989.

37. The Times, 20 December 1989.

38. Ibid., 23 December 1989.

39. Ibid., 26 December 1989.

40. ‘Year of Revolution’, leading article, The Times, 30 December 1989.

41. The Times, 28 December 1989.

42. Daniel Johnson, The Times, 7 April 1990.

43. The Times, 29 December 1989.

44. Ibid., 22 and 29 December 1989.

45. Guardian, 26 November 1990.

46. Independent, 30 January 2002.

47. Charles Wilson to Richard Williams, 3 April 1987, ref. 9838/5/2.

48. Tim de Lisle to the author, interview, 8 February 2005; Independent, 16 August 1989; Guardian, 16 August 1989 and 2 March 1998.

49. Graham Paterson to the author, interview, 18 September 2002.

50. Charles Wilson to the author, interview, 24 February 2004.

51. Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.

52. Ibid., 5 August 2003.

53. Clifford Longley to the author, interview, 3 September 2004; Mary Ann Sieghart to the author, interview, 20 January 2004.

54. Charles Wilson to the author, interview, 19 and 24 February 2004.

55. Philip Howard to the author, interview, 5 December 2002.

56. Richard Williams to the author, interview, 12 May 2004.

57. Charles Wilson to the author, interview, 24 February 2004.

CHAPTER NINE: SIMON JENKINS (PP. 367–415)

1. Recollection of John Bryant. John Bryant to the author, interview, 15 October 2004.

2. Simon Jenkins to the author, interview, 20 December 2004; Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 2003; Andrew Knight to the author, interview, 2 December 2004; Andrew Knight to Rupert Murdoch, 25 September 1992, ref. 015729.

3. Julian Barnes, Letters from London 1990–1995, p. 40.

4. Simon Jenkins to the author, interview, 20 December 2004.

5. David Watts to the author, interview, 17 August 2004.

6. Brian MacArthur, Paper Round, Sunday Times, 25 March 1990.

7. Clifford Longley to Simon Jenkins, 16 April 1991, ref. 14269/16.

8. Simon Jenkins to the author, interview, 20 December 2004.

9. Ibid.

10. Guardian, 26 November 1990.

11. Simon Jenkins to leader writers, memorandum, 5 May 1990, ref. 13261/6.

12. Mary Ann Sieghart to Simon Jenkins, 18 March 1990, ref. 13261/6.

13. Independent, 20 June 1990.

14. Barnes, Letters from London, p. 41; Simon Jenkins to the author, interview, 20 December 2004.

15. ‘Only One of London’s Problems’, leading article, The Times, 28 March 1988.

16. ‘Community Charge’, leading article, The Times, 17 December 1986.

17. The Times, 5 December 1987.

18. ‘Community Charge’, leading article, The Times, 17 December 1986.

19. See, for example, ‘A Misleading Debate’ and ‘Many Names, Not Many Friends’, leading articles, The Times, 7 October and 5 December 1987; ‘Making it Work’, leading article, The Times, 20 January 1990.

20. ‘Community Charging’, leading article, The Times, 29 March 1990.

21. ‘Untrivial Pursuit’, leading article, The Times, 19 March 1990.

22. Robert Blake, The Times, 7 April 1990.

23. ‘Taking the Plunge’ and ‘Averting Stagflation’, leading articles, The Times, 6 and 19 October 1990.

24. ‘Taking the Plunge’, leading article, The Times, 6 October 1990.

25. The Economist, 13 October 1990; Daily Mail, 6 October 1990; Today, 6 October 1990.

26. The Times, 8 October 1990.

27. ‘Sir Geoffrey Resigns’, leading article, The Times, 2 November 1990.

28. The Times, 14 November 1990.

29. ‘Heseltine Must Stand’, leading article, The Times, 12 November 1990.

30. Michael Heseltine, Life in the Jungle, pp. 360–61, 373.

31. The Times, 17 November 1990.

32. ‘The Case for Thatcher’, The Times, 20 November 1990.

33. The Times, 21 November 1990.

34. ‘Her Life in Their Hands’, leading article, The Times, 21 November 1990.

35. ‘A Wider Field’, leading article, The Times, 22 November 1990.

36. The Times, 23 November 1990.

37. Simon Jenkins to the author, interview, 20 December 2004.

38. ‘Best of Three’, leading article, The Times, 27 November 1990.

39. Simon Jenkins to the author, interview, 20 December 2004.

40. The Times, 28 November 1990.

41. John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, vol. 2, p. 662.

42. The Times, 22 March 1988.

43. Ibid., 3 August 1990; ‘Iraq’s Naked Villainy’, leading article, The Times, 3 August 1990.

44. Ibid., 6 August 1990.

45. Ibid., 7 August 1990.

46. ‘No Choice But War’, leading article, The Times, 16 January 1991.

47. David Lipsey memo, 8 January 1991, ref. 14269/13/2.

48. John Major to David Livsey, associate editor, 11 January 1991, ref. 013522; Brian MacArthur, Paper Round, Sunday Times, 13 January 1991; The Times, 16 January 1991.

49. Brian MacArthur, Paper Round, Sunday Times, 13 January 1991.

50. The Times, 16 January 1991.

51. Ibid., 18 January 1991.

52. Ibid., 2 February 1991.

53. Richard Beeston to the author, interview, 10 January 2005.

54. Ibid.

55. The Times, 14 February 1991.

56. ‘Direct Hit in Amiriya’, leading article, The Times, 14 February 1991.

57. ‘Saddam’s Smokescreen’, leading article, The Times, 22 February 1991.

58. The Times, 28 February 1991.

59. Ibid., 28 February 1991.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid., 1 March 1991.

62. Quoted in Anthony Seldon, Major: A Political Life, p. 163.

63. ‘Helping the Kurds’, leading article, The Times, 6 April 1991.

64. Neil Chenoweth, Virtual Murdoch, p. 64.

65. Quoted in Chenoweth, Virtual Murdoch, p. 69.

66. The Times, 6 December 1990.

67. Andrew Knight to the author, interview, 2 December 2004.

68. John Warden, The Times Parliamentary Report: A Survey of MPs, July 1986, ref. 9837/11.

69. Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 5 August 2003.

70. ‘To Maastricht’, leading article, The Times, 9 December 1991.

71. ‘A Sort of Triumph’ and ‘Job Well Done’, The Times, 11 and 12 December 1991.

72. The Times, 12 and 13 December 1991.

73. Ibid., 11 December 1991.

74. ‘Where Britain’s interests lies by then is impossible now to say, which was precisely Mr Major’s point’: ‘Job Well Done’, leading article, The Times, 12 December 1991.

75. Anatole Kaletsky’s articles in The Times, 17, 18 and 24 March 1992.

76. Brian MacArthur, The Times, 31 March 1992.

77. Matthew Parris, Chance Witness, pp. 378–81; The Times, 2 April 1992.

78. The Times, 7 April 1992.

79. ‘Major’s First Term’, leading article, The Times, 8 April 1992.

80. ‘Moments of Inertia’, leading article, The Times, 9 April 1992.

81. Brian MacArthur, Paper Round, Sunday Times, 12 April 1992.

82. The Times, 11 April 1992.

83. Brian MacArthur, Paper Round, Sunday Times, 2 July 1989.

84. Simon Jenkins to Andrew Knight, 27 June 1991, ref. 18643.

85. Simon Jenkins to Andrew Knight and John Dux, 6 December 1991, ref. 18643.

86. The Times had a 27.4 per cent share of the week’s editorial columns; Independent, 26.4 per cent; Telegraph 24.7 per cent; Guardian, 21.4 per cent; source: Media Monitoring Service.

87. Andrew Knight to the author, interview, 2 December 2004.

88. Andrew Knight to Rupert Murdoch, 15 July 1992, ref. 023746.

89. Andrew Knight to the author, interview, 2 December 2004.

90. Simon Jenkins to the author, interview, 20 December 2004.

91. Paul Dacre to the author, conversation, 8 February 2005.

92. Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2004.

93. Various opinions expressed to the author, 2000–2004.

94. Andrew Knight to Rupert Murdoch, 15 July 1992, ref. 023746.

95. Charles Wilson to the author, interview, 24 February 2004.

96. Simon Pearson to the author, interview, 13 July 2004.

97. Graham Searjeant to the author, interview, 11 January 2004.

98. Simon Jenkins to the author, interview, 20 December 2004.

99. Ibid.

CHAPTER TEN: CRITICAL TIMES (PP. 416–471)

1. Peter Stothard wrote a touching portrayal of his father in ‘There will be no obit’, The Times, 31 December 1997.

2. This became a regular claim made in Stephen Glover’s Media Studies column for the Spectator even though he wrote to Stothard to admit it was not true; Stephen Glover to Peter Stothard, 27 May 1993, Stothard Papers.

3. The Economist, 7 August 1993.

4. The Times, 29 January 1994; Independent, 7 February 1994.

5. Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 15 November 2004.

6. The Times Summary of Annual Performance, Andrew Knight Papers, ref. 015729.

7. Anatole Kaletsky to Andrew Knight, 20 August 1992, ref. 023746; Andrew Knight to John Dux and Peter Stothard, 3 March 1994, ref. 021472.

8. Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 15 November 2004.

9. Financial Times, 2 September 1993.

10. Guardian, 2 August 1993.

11. Daily Telegraph, 2 September 1993.

12. Independent, 2 September 1993.

13. Financial Times, 2 September 1993.

14. Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 15 November 2004.

15. Independent, 2 September 1993; Daily Telegraph, 2 September 1993.

16. Source: ABC, Financial Times, 26 August 1994.

17. Max Hastings, Editor, pp. 355–61.

18. Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 15 November 2004.

19. Independent, 25 June 1994; Hastings, Editor, pp. 360–62.

20. Independent, 24 June 1994.

21. Hastings, Editor, p. 363.

22. Daily Telegraph, 26 August 1994.

23. Evening Standard, 10 May 1995.

24. Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 15 November 2004.

25. Media Week, 5 January 1996; Guardian, 22 August 1992.

26. Independent, 15 November 1997.

27. The Times, 22 May 1999; Independent, 22 May 1999.

28. The Times, 16 July 1997.

29. Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 15 November 2004.

30. John Goodbody to the author, interview, 22 November 2004.

31. The Times, 4 September 1991.

32. Marcus Williams and John Goodbody to the author, interviews, 18 November 2004; Keith Blackmore to the author, interview, 25 November 2004.

33. Simon Barnes to the author, interview, 24 January 2005.

34. The Times, 3 August 1996.

35. Ibid., 23 September 2000.

36. Ibid., 6 November 2004.

37. ‘A Jackpot to Be Won’, leading article, The Times, 23 October 1993.

38. John Major, John Major: The Autobiography, p. 409.

39. ‘A Risk for the Lottery’, leading article, The Times, 4 November 1994.

40. ‘Grandees’ Opera’, leading article, The Times, 1 July 1998.

41. The Times, 25 May 1988.

42. Ibid., 23 May 1986.

43. Rodney Milnes to the author, interview, 30 November 2004; Richard Morrison to the author, interview, 16 November 2004.

44. The Times, 12 December 1996.

45. Ibid., 28 November 2000.

46. According to a British Phonographic Industry analysis and an estimate in the Sunday Business: The Times, 19 February 1997.

47. The Times, 11 April and 14 May 1994.

48. Ibid., 30 April and 14 May 1994.

49. Ibid., 26 August 1994.

50. Ibid., 27 December 1996.

51. David Sinclair to the author, interview, 25 November 2004.

52. The Times, 27 December 1996.

53. Ibid., 1 January 2000.

54. Ibid., 16 September 1997.

55. Ibid., 13 September 1997.

56. Ibid., 15 July 2000.

57. Ibid., 10 June 1999; Dalya Alberge to the author, interview.

58. The Times, 28 November 2000.

59. Ibid., 30 October 1998 and 14 May 1999.

60. Ibid., 17 January 1998.

61. Ibid., 30 December 1991.

62. Ibid., 1 January 2000.

63. Ibid., 22 January 1998.

64. Ibid., 20 October 1994.

65. Ibid., 12 May 1994 and 20 May 1999.

66. Ibid., 22 February 1996.

67. The Times, 21 September 1995.

68. Lisa Armstrong to the author, interview, 11 January 2005.

69. The Times, 11 September 2000.

70. Nigel Hawkes to the author, interview, 2 February 2005; The Times, 28 February 1991.

71. The Times, 8 November 1990.

72. Ibid., 19 December 2000.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE HEART OF EUROPE (PP. 472–496)

1. Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 15 November 2004.

2. See, for example, ‘Disbanding Sterling’, leading article, The Times, 30 December 1991; ‘Good Money After Bad’, leading article, The Times, 11 September 1992.

3. The Times, 7 October 1992.

4. Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 15 November 2004.

5. The Times, 4 June 1992.

6. John Bryant to the author, interview, 15 October 2004.

7. Note by Peter Stothard, 10 December 1997, Stothard Papers.

8. The Times, 21 October 1992; Daily Mail, 22 October 1992.

9. Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 15 November 2004.

10. John Major, John Major: The Autobiography, p. 339; the same conclusion is reached in Anthony Seldon, Major: A Political Life, p. 317.

11. The Times, 28 October 1992; Guardian, 28 June 1993.

12. The Times, 10 May 1993.

13. See, for example, ‘Must Try Harder’, ‘Childish Rites’, ‘The Test for Teachers’, leading articles, The Times, 6 February, 5 and 9 April 1996.

14. The Times, 21 May 1991.

15. ‘The Polys Are Coming’, leading article, The Times, 21 May 1991.

16. ‘The Ranking of Universities’, leading article, The Times, 14 October 1992.

17. The Times, 13 October 1992.

18. ‘The Ranking of Universities’, leading article, The Times, 14 October 1992.

19. The Times, 30 December 1994.

20. Source: MORI, July-September 1994.

21. Matthew Parris, Chance Witness, pp. 404, 410–11; Graham Stewart, Burying Caesar: Churchill, Chamberlain and the Battle for the Tory Party, pp. 69, 160.

22. Matthew Parris, Chance Witness, pp. 408–9; Matthew Parris to the author, interview, 25 January 2005.

23. Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 15 November 2004.

24. Matthew Parris to the author, interview, 25 January 2005.

25. The Times, 23 May 1994.

26. Ibid., 4 October 1995.

27. Matthew Parris, Chance Witness, pp. 411–14.

28. The Times, 27 June 1995.

29. Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 15 November 2004.

30. Michael Gove to the author, interview, 7 October 2004; Mary Ann Sieghart to the author, interview, 20 January 2005.

31. Note made by Peter Stothard, 6 January 1997, Stothard Papers.

32. Ibid., 23 January 1997, Stothard Papers; Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 8 November 2004.

33. The Times, 10 February 1997.

34. Tim Hames to the author, interview, 12 October 2004.

35. The Times, 21 April 1997.

36. ‘Sceptical Voters’, leading article, The Times, 28 April 1997.

37. The Times, 28 April 1997.

38. Ibid., 1 May 1997.

39. Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 15 November 2004.

40. Mary Ann Sieghart to the author, interview, 20 January 2005.

41. ‘Principle Not Party’, leading article, The Times, 29 April 1997.

42. Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 5 August 2003.

43. The Times, 22 April 1997.

44. Ibid., 24 April 1997.

45. Ibid., 29 April 1997.

46. Ibid., 30 April 1997.

47. Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 15 November 2004.

48. The Times, 28 April 1997.

49. ‘Tories in Trauma’, leading article, The Times, 3 May 1997.

50. The Times, 6 May 1997.

51. Ibid., 11 June 1997.

52. Ibid., 19 June 1997.

53. ‘Push-Me-Pull-You’, leading article, The Times, 19 June 1997.

CHAPTER TWELVE: NEW LABOUR, NEW JOURNALISM (PP. 497–558)

1. The Times, 2 May 1997.

2. Ibid., 25 April 1997.

3. John Mair to the author, interview, 29 November 2004.

4. ‘End of Empire’, leading article, The Times, 1 July 1997.

5. The Times, 3 September 1997.

6. Ibid., 2 September 1997; Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 8 November 2004.

7. Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 8 November 2004.

8. Alan Hamilton to the author, 7 December 2004.

9. The Times, 10 January 1997.

10. Ibid., 17 May 1991.

11. Ibid., 9 August 1991; ‘Discipline of the Press’, leading article, The Times, 10 August 1991.

12. ‘Perils for the Press’, leading article, The Times, 15 January 1993.

13. ‘Discipline of the Press’, leading article, The Times, 10 August 1991.

14. The Times, 16 June 1992.

15. Ibid., 12 January 1993.

16. Ibid., 11 January 1993.

17. ‘A Fine Mess’, leading article, The Times, 25 March 1993.

18. ‘Royalty Uncovered’, leading article, The Times, 21 August 1992.

19. Daily Telegraph, 28 April 1998.

20. Lord Wakeham to the House of Lords, Hansard, 27 January 1999.

21. The Times, 8 September and 14 October 1999.

22. Ibid., 28 April 2001.

23. Time Magazine, 8 July 1996.

24. The Times, 28 April 2001.

25. Ibid., 4 May 2001.

26. Ibid., 27 November and 13 December 2002.

27. The Times, Law Supplement, 21 May 2002.

28. Ibid., 30 January 1999.

29. The Times, 21 April 1992.

30. Richard Owen (foreign editor) and David Watts to Peter Stothard, 10 January 1994, ref. 026672.

31. Jonathan Mirsky to the author, interview, 8 September 2004.

32. Ibid.

33. Richard Owen to Peter Stothard, 30 March 1995, ref. 026672; The Times, 29 and 10 March 1995.

34. ‘Voice of Hong Kong’, The Times, 19 September 1995.

35. ‘China’s Obligations’ and ‘Beyond 1997’, leading articles, The Times, 10 January and 5 March 1996.

36. ‘Stand by Taiwan’ and ‘The Taiwan Truth’, leading article, The Times, 6 February and 19 March 1996; Jiang Enzhu (Chinese Ambassador to Britain), letters to the editor, The Times, 28 March 1996.

37. The Times, 21 November 1996.

38. Ibid., 20 February 1997.

39. Ref. 026672; The Times, 5 March 1998.

40. ‘Hopes for Hong Kong’, leading article, The Times, 30 June 1997.

41. ‘The China Trap’, leading article, The Times, 26 June 1996.

42. Rupert Murdoch to Michael Sandberg (chairman, Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank), quoted in William Shawcross, Murdoch, p. 287.

43. Daily Telegraph, 7 March 1998.

44. Guardian, 5 March 1998.

45. The Times, 6 March 1998.

46. Ibid., 27 March 1998; Charles Moore to Peter Stothard, 30 March, 31 March and 6 April 1998; John Bryant to Charles Moore, 3 April 1998, and Peter Stothard to Charles Moore, 6 April 1998, ref. 029076.

47. Free!, The Freedom Forum Online, 22 January 1998.

48. Daily Telegraph, 4 March 1998.

49. Spectator, 21 March 1998.

50. The Times, 5 March 1998.

51. Note of meeting between Jonathan Mirsky and George Brock, 10 March 1998, ref. 026672; letters to the editor, The Times, 2 April 1998.

52. Jonathan Mirsky to the author, interview, 8 September 2004.

53. The Times, 5 June 1999.

54. Daniel Finkelstein to the author, conversation, 16 July 2004.

55. The Times, 4 October 1999; Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 29 November 2004.

56. The Times, 12 June 1999.

57. Ibid., 13 July 1999.

58. ‘Bunkered down’, leading article, The Times, 15 July 1999.

59. David Mackilligan, letter to the editor, The Times, 16 July 1999.

60. The Times, 16 July 1999.

61. Ibid., 17 July 1999.

62. Ibid., 22 July 1999.

63. ‘A Single Issue’, leading article, The Times, 9 June 1999.

64. Michael Gove to the author, interview, 7 October 2004; Tim Hames to the author, interview, 12 October 2004; Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 29 November 2004; John Bryant to the author, interview, 25 January 2005.

65. The Times, 13 July 1999.

66. Ibid., 24 November 1999.

67. Ibid.

68. Lord Ashcroft to the author, interview, 18 January 2005.

69. Ibid.

70. The Times, 9 December 1999.

71. Guardian, 10 December 1999.

72. The Times, 6 June 2003.

73. Ibid., 10 August 2002; Guardian, 28 January 2002; Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 15 December 2003.

74. The Times, 26 February 2000.

75. As Roy Greenslade was quick to point out: Guardian, 3 April 2000.

76. Peter Stothard to Times staff, notes for speech, 29 March 2000, Stothard Papers.

77. ‘Mods and Rockers’, leading article, The Times, 6 July 1998.

78. The Times, 8 September 1999.

79. Ibid., 20 April 2000.

80. Ibid., 19 May 1999; Peter Oborne and Simon Walters, Alastair Campbell, p. 243.

81. David Ruddock to the author, interview, 14 October 2004.

82. The Times, 17, 19, 20 and 27 July 2000.

83. Ibid., 9 February 1999.

84. Ibid., 9 May 2001.

85. ‘In Our Time’, leading article, The Times, 5 June 2001.

86. Chris Metz, letters to the editor, The Times, 7 June 2001.

87. The Times, 7 June 2001.

88. Ibid., 8 June 2001.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: WAR IN PEACETIME (559–609)

1. Quoted in Robert W. Merry, ‘The Great Friedman-Huntington debate’, The International Economy, 22 December 2002.

2. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1998, pp. 29–35, 192–3.

3. The Times, 10 and 11 May 1994.

4. Ibid., 9 December 1997.

5. ‘A Chance for Hope’, leading article, The Times, 14 September 1993.

6. ‘The Earth Moved’, leading article, The Times, 27 July 2000.

7. The Times, 1 February 1995; Seldon, Major, pp. 526–30; Major, Autobiography, pp. 466–71.

8. Michael Gove to the author, interview, 7 October 2004.

9. The Times, 11 July 1996.

10. Ibid., 25 July 2000.

11. ‘The Peace of Paris’, leading article, The Times, 19 November 1990.

12. The Times, 23 December 1991.

13. ‘Mikhail Gorbachev’, leading article, The Times, 26 December 1991.

14. The Times, 14 September 1992.

15. ‘Forces for Peace’, leading article, The Times, 26 January 1993.

16. The Times, 17 April 1993.

17. Geoffrey Lee Williams, letters to the editor, The Times, 17 April 1993.

18. Richard Beeston to the author, interview, 10 January 2005.

19. Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, p. 115.

20. Anthony Loyd to the author, interview, 2 February 2005.

21. Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, pp. 112, 115.

22. The Times, 24 November 1993.

23. ‘Fireflies In June’, leading article, The Times, 5 June 1995.

24. The Times, 31 May 1995.

25. ‘Run Out of Town’, leading article, The Times, 12 July 1995.

26. The Times, 4 October 1995.

27. ‘Hope Hotel’, leading article, The Times, 22 November 1995.

28. ‘Bosnia, Ohio’, leading article, The Times, 24 November 1995.

29. Sam Kiley to the author, interview, 3 February 2005.

30. The Times, 26 September 1998.

31. Ibid., 14 July 1992.

32. Sam Kiley to the author, interview, 3 February 2005.

33. The Times, 22 August 1994 and 9 April 1998.

34. Ibid., 3 October 2001.

35. Ibid., 31 July 1993.

36. Ibid., 24 September 1998.

37. Ibid., 15 July 1999.

38. Ibid., 2 April 1999.

39. ‘Winging It’, leading article, The Times, 16 June 1998.

40. ‘To Will The End’, leading article, The Times, 8 April 1999.

41. See, in particular, ‘Phase Three’ and ‘Facts on the Ground’, leading articles, The Times, 5 April and 17 April 1999; the case for war was laid out in ‘War Over Kosovo’, leading article, The Times, 25 March 1999.

42. The Times, 25 March 1999.

43. Ibid., 1 April 1999.

44. Ibid.

45. ‘Give War a Chance’, leading article, The Times, 7 May 1999.

46. The Times, 1 June 1999 and 2 July 2001.

47. Ibid., 8 May 1999.

48. Ibid., 3 May 1999.

49. Ibid., 18 June 1999.

50. Ibid., 22 May 1999.

51. Ibid., 25 January 1995.

52. Ibid., 4 February 1995.

53. Ibid., 8 February 1995.

54. Anthony Loyd to the author, interview, 2 February 2005.

55. The Times, 2 November 1999.

56. Ibid., 2 February 2000.

57. Ibid., 22 December 1989.

58. Ibid., 10 May 1997.

59. Ibid., 2 October 2001.

60. Ibid., 12 September 2001.

61. ‘Still the Enemy’, leading article, The Times, 13 September 2001.

62. The Times, 14 November 2001.

63. Ibid., 12 September 2001.

64. Ibid., 14 November 2001.

65. Ibid., 9 October 2001.

66. Ibid., 8 October 2001.

67. Ibid., 19 October 2001.

68. Ibid., 12 November 2001.

69. Ibid., 14 November 2001.

70. Ibid., 15 November 2001.

71. Ibid.

72. Ibid.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: DUMBING DOWN? (PP. 610–650)

1. Matthew Parris, Chance Witness, p. 477.

2. John Grigg, The History of The Times, vol. VI: The Thomson Years, p. 579.

3. Source: MORI, 1992.

4. Author’s calculation from the raw data provided by The Times Strategic Planning Department.

5. The author would like to thank Kat Hounsell and Susannah Donnelly for help in compiling this data.

6. The Times, 14 December 1995.

7. David Watts to the author, interview, 6 January 2005.

8. Peregrine Worsthorne, ‘Dumbing Up’, in Stephen Glover (ed.), The Penguin Book of Journalism, pp. 116–18.

9. The Times, 26 March 1957.

10. Source: Premier TGI for the British Market Research Bureau survey focusing on business readers in the A – B social grades.

11. Jonathan Mirsky to the author, interview, 8 September 2004.

12. Richard Williams to the author, interview, 12 May 2004.

13. Lord Jenkins of Hillhead to Peter Stothard, 25 September 1995, ref. 019975.

14. The Times, 4 April 1990.

15. Leon Pilpel to Simon Jenkins, 22 March 1990. ref. 13262/2.

16. William Heseltine letter, 28 July 1986, and Andrew Neil letter, 29 July 1986, The Times; Andrew Neil, Full Disclosure, pp. 195–207.

17. Henry G. Button, letters to the editor, 17 August and 8 April 1993.

18. Letters to the editor, The Times, 4, 16, 17, 22 and 23 September 1987.

19. A. D. Bowers, letters to the editor, The Times, 20 May 1981.

20. The Times, 21 March 1987.

21. Miles Kington, ‘Moreover …’, The Times, 11 January 1985; Pat Adams, letters to the editor, The Times, 18 January 1985.

22. Revd I. H. G. Graham-Orlebar, 26 April 1980 and 13 May 1980; Linnea Cliff Hodges (1 May 1990), letters to the editor, The Times.

23. J. M. Wober, ‘Top people write to The Times’, British Journalism Review, vol. 15, no. 2, 2004.

24. The Times, 13 May 1981.

25. Spectator, 3 March 1984.

26. The Times, 16 April 1988.

27. Peter Utley to Charles Wilson, 27 October 1987, Wilson Papers.

28. The Times, 24 October 1986.

29. Ibid., 10 March 1982.

30. Ibid., 1 October 1981; The Times, 2 October 2000.

31. John Higgins to Simon Jenkins, 16 May 1990, ref. 13262/3.

32. The Times, 24 September 1998.

33. Ibid., 28 March 1983; Spectator, 17 March 1984.

34. The Times, 29 November 1986.

35. Besides Coats’s boasts to Thornton, there were also various hints in the diaries of Cecil Beaton and Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon – the latter whom the published obituary did identify as one of Coats’s partners. Michael Thornton to Simon Jenkins, 15 August 1990, and John Higgins to Simon Jenkins, 29 August 1990, ref. 13262/3. The Times, 10 August 1990; Lady Joan Robertson’s letter in The Times, 16 August 1990.

36. The Times, 16 and 21 March 1995; Peter Stothard correspondence files, ref. 019975.

37. The Times 19 August 1983 and 6 November 2001.

38. Ian Brunskill to the author, interview, 16 November 2004.

39. For example, The Times, 30 January 1995.

40. The Times, 21 July 1990, 27 and 28 November 1991.

41. Ibid., 30 October 1995.

42. The Journalist’s Handbook, p. 36.

43. Mary Dejevsky to the author, 30 November 2004.

44. The Times, 1 January 2000.

45. Brian MacArthur, Sunday Times, 17 April 1988; Brian MacArthur, The Times, 2 July 2004.

46. Speech at the Stationers’ Livery Hall, 8 November 2004, reported in Guardian (online) 9 November 2004.

47. Daily Telegraph, 5 March 1998.

48. Peter Stothard to the author, interview, 15 November 2004.

49. Simon Jenkins to the author, interview, 20 December 2004.

50. Rupert Murdoch to the author, interview, 4 August 2003.

51. Nicholas Coleridge, Paper Tigers, p. 504.

52. Peter Chernin’s presentation to Bill O’Neill, 21 June 2002, quoted in O’Neill, Copy Out manuscript.

53. Rupert Murdoch to James Harding, Financial Times, 11 June 2002.

54. Les Hinton to the author, 23 November 2004.

55. John Walter’s appeal ‘To the Public’, Daily Universal Register, 1 January 1785.

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INDEX

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.

A

The Absence of War (David Hare) 463

Abu Jihad 337

ACAS (Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service) 89–90

Ackroyd, Peter 182, 185

Active Newsroom 49 see also Evans, Harold

Adams, Gerry 491, 564 see also Sinn Fein

Adams, James 234

Adams, John 450

AEU (Amalgamated Engineering Union) 282

Afghanistan 348, 591, 598, 600–603

Africa 581 see also Apartheid; Congo; Rwanda; Sierra Leone; Somalia; South Africa, Sudan

Aga Khan 17

Aidid, General Muhammad Farrah 580–581

Aitken, Jonathan 30–32, 48, 101, 496, 519, 542

al-Assad, Hafez 151

al-Qaeda 579, 598, 601, 604–605

Alberge, Dalya 461

Algeria 598

Allardyce, Jason 501

Allison, John 449

Almond, Mark 354, 357

Amiel, Barbara 315, 341

Amis, Kingsley 614

ANC (African Congress Party) 560

Ancram, Michael 538, 539, 541

Anderson, Bruce 475

Anderson, Terry 334–336

Andropov, Yuri 147, 216

Anglo-Irish Agreement 563

Annan, Kofi 149

Annan, Noel 339

Anson, Charles 634

Antelope, HMS 134

Apartheid 124 see also South Africa

Appleyard, Christina 548

Arab League 150

Arafat, Yasser 561–563

Arcadia (Tom Stoppard) 463

Archer of Weston-super-Mare, Lord (Jeffery) 540, 543, 550

Ardent, HMS 134

Argentina 119–121, 125–126, 129, 133 see also Falklands War; Galtieri, General Leopoldo

Arlott, John 207

Armide (C.W. Gluck) 451

Armstrong, Lisa 466–468, 624

Arnett, Peter 398

Ashcroft, Michael 536–546, 609

Ashdown, Paddy 317, 407

Ashford, Nicholas 124, 131

Ashworth, Anne 622, 624

Ashworth, Jon 322

ASLEF (Associated Society of Locomotive Steam Engineers and Firemen) 83, 250

Associated Newspapers 20, 30, 31, 32, 101, 239, 272–273, 298

Associated Press 152, 334–335

Astor family 17, 18–19

Astor, David 40

Astor, Gavin (later Lord) 8, 19, 24, 63

Astor, Lord (John Jacob) 23

Atex computers 231, 233–234, 236, 247, 258

Atherton, Michael 440

Atlantic Richfield 30, 31, 40

AUEW (Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers) 158, 236, 288

Austin, Tim 11, 60, 93, 102, 180, 235–236, 246, 256, 261, 372, 435, 609

The Australian 22, 39, 41, 646

Australian Financial Review 90

Aylard, Richard 130

B

Bad Times at The Times 188

Baker, James 560

Baldwin, Tom 535–536, 538–540, 545, 552

Baltic States 567

Bank of New York 517

Banks, David 235

Barak, Ehud 562, 600

Baring, Sir Evelyn 143

Barings Bank 4

Barlow, Frank 298

Barnes, Ivan 212, 311, 626

Barnes, Julian 369

Barnes, Rosie 317

Barnes, Simon 201–202, 326, 330–331, 421, 442, 444–445

Barnes, Thomas 51, 53, 103

Barnetson, Lord (William) 5

Bassett, Philip 373

BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 186, 529–530

Beattie, Ken 90

Beck, Ernest 353

Beckham, David 444

Beckett, Margaret 434, 487

Beeston, Richard 387, 390, 392–393, 398, 571–572, 592, 600, 640

Begin, Menachem 149, 152, 154

Belgrano see General Belgrano

Belize 537–539, 541, 544

Bell, John 325

Bell, Lord (Tim) 541

Bell, Mary 515–516

Bell, Steve 482

Bellamy, Rex 204, 441

Beloff, Max 553–554

Benaud, Richie 440

Benn, Tony 78, 80–83, 114, 164, 265, 271, 279, 309

Bennett, Alan 178, 183

Bennett, Vanora 593

Berlins, Marcel 92, 108, 183

Berry, Don 48

Berthoud, Roger 92, 108

Bevins, Anthony 162, 303, 310–311

Bhutto, Benazir 597

Bicentenary of The Times 206–210

Biffen, John 27–29, 31, 32, 99–100, 104, 265, 305, 308

‘Big Bang’ 323–324

Bild Zeitung 174

Biko, Steve 183

bin Laden, Osama 389, 596, 598, 600–602, 605

Binney, Marcus 373, 415, 638

Binyon, Michael 145, 146, 171–173, 177, 180, 208, 352, 404, 486, 600

Birtwistle, Harrison 450

Bishop, Patrick 138, 140

Bissell, Frances 359

Black, Conrad (Lord Black of Crossharbour) 9, 241, 306, 343, 431, 485

Black, Captain Jeremy 130

Black Monday 324–325

Black Wednesday 474, 476–477

Blackmore, Keith 439, 469

Blair, Tony

ascendancy 482–483

and Bush 601

constitutional reform 487, 499, 553–554

devolution 499

general election

(1997) 491–493

(2001) 555–557

Kosovo 588

Mary Bell furore 515

Millennium Dome 503

New Labour 455, 488

As Prime Minister 493, 497

Sierra Leone success 583–584

Tony’s cronies 535

The Blair Witch Project (dirs Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez) 464

Blake, David 66

Blake, Lord (Robert) 379

Bluff Cove 136–137, 139

Blum, Léon 70

Blundy, Anna 64

Blur 454–455

Bokassa, Emperor Jean-Bedal 70

Bone, James 517, 519, 599–600

Borrie, Sir Gordon 363

Bosnian War 568–573, 574–578, 579, 584 590 see also Dayton Accord; Kosovo; NATO; Serbia

Botham, Ian 204, 440

Bottomley, Peter 31, 429

Boutros Ghali, Boutros 580

Bouverie Street 222–226, 229–230, 249, 255, 297 see also The Sun; The News of the World

Boxer, Mark (Marc) 199

Boyes, Roger 145–146, 346, 619

Boyle, Danny 465

Bradlee, Ben 64

Bradley, Ian 77

Bradley, Peter 539

Bradshaw, Dr Tim 419

Brady, Reg 11, 87–88

Bragg, Melvyn 188

Brassed Off (dir. Mark Herman) 465

Brata, Sasthi 73

Brearley, Mike 204, 207

Bremner, Charles 324, 619

Brenton, Howard 115, 183

Brett, Alastair 520

Brewerton, David 325

Brezhnev, Leonaid 147, 216, 350–351, 357

Bridgeman, John 434

Bridges, George 540

Briggs, Asa 37

British Press Awards 147

British Rail 83, 156, 232–233

British Satellite Broadcasting 401

Britoil 162

Brittan, Leon 310

Brittan, Samuel 68

Britten, Benjamin 450

Britton, Tony 231

Brock, George 198, 404, 417, 437, 499, 529, 534, 608

Brogan, Hugh 92

Brook, Peter 183

Brookes, Peter 200, 482, 486–487, 557, 601

Brown, Craig 315

Brown, Geoff 401, 449, 464–465

Brown, Lord George 80

Brown, Glenn 461

Brown, Gordon 488, 497, 554

Brown, Peter 254

Brown, Tina 64, 112, 113, 116, 417, 418

Bruce-Gardyne, Jock 166

Brunskill, Ian 635

Brunton, Sir Gordon 7, 17–18, 20–25, 28, 31

Bryant, John 235, 304, 372, 413, 415, 436, 476, 482, 508, 541, 546–547, 608

Bryson, Bill 33, 88, 253

Brzezinski, Zbigniew 388

Buckley, Christine 616

Burchill, Julie 235

Bush, George 388, 389, 395, 560, 579, 581

Bush, George W. 563, 599, 601

Butler, David 315, 316

Butler, Rab 108, 631, 633

Butt, Ronald 70

Butterworth, Jez 463

C

Calcutt QC, Sir David 512–513

Callaghan, Brigid 624

Callaghan, James 43, 68, 76, 80

Calman, Mel 56, 200, 382

Cameron, James 464

Campbell, Alastair 552

Canary Wharf 324

Cannon, Tom 480

Capes, Geoff 441

Cappi, Tony 236–237

Carey, John 154

Carlyle, Robert 465

Carman QC, George 539

Caro, Sir Anthony 460–461

Carr, E.H. 215

Carr family 30, 39

Carr, Sir William 99

Carrington, Lord (Peter) 125, 146

Cash, Bill 475

Cats (Andrew Lloyd Webber) 183–184

Catto, Lord (Thomas) 21

Cazalet, Edward 143

CBI (Confederation of British Industry) 380

CBS Broadcasting 395

Ceausescu, Nicolae 346, 354–356

Chancellor, Alexander 108, 359, 420

Channel 4 185

Chappell, David 439

Chapple, Frank 156

Chard, Ted 225–226

Chariots of Fire (dir. Hugh Hudson) 184

Charles, Prince of Wales, marriage 61–63

Chechnya 591–594

Chemical Brothers 456

Chernenko, Konstantin 147–148

Chernin, Peter 298

Cherwell 7, 37

Chicago Sun-Times 217, 235–236

China 187, 348–350, 356–357, 523–534 see also Hong Kong

Christie, Linford 331

The Church and the Bomb 148

Churchill, Sir Winston 11

Clare, John 318, 644

Clark, General Wesley 589

Clarke, Kenneth 265, 293, 475, 489, 493, 494–495, 558

Clarke, Tom 325–326, 330, 439

CLEAR (Campaign for Lead-Free Air) 105

Clement, Barry 258, 303

Cliff, Nigel 465

Clifford, Max 513

Clinton, Bill 468, 527, 561, 575, 581, 583, 585–586, 588–589, 601

Clwyd, Ann 429

CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) 148, 159, 310

CNN (Cable News Network) 391, 398

Coats, Peter 6334

Cobain, Ian 603

Cobain, Kurt 454

Cobbett, William 103

Coe, Peter 184

Coe, Sebastian 204

Cohen, Barbara 290

Cold War 160, 215, 357, 387, 405, 559, 567, 609

Cole, John 419

Coleridge, Nicholas 646

Collier, John 33–34, 88, 89, 98

Collins, Neil 430

Columbia space shuttle 73

Communism 144–146, 156, 215–216, 354–357, 522, 526, 527, 560, 591

Competition Bill 434

Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe 559, 567 see also OSCE

Congdon, Professor Tim 320

Congo, Democratic Republic of 583

Conroy, Harry 155, 244, 253–254, 263

Conservative Party 126, 162, 163–165, 219, 312–317, 318, 375, 550

Ashcroft affair 535–544

general elections 162–164, 312–316, 318, 346, 406–409, 488–493

higher education 479

hostility towards 481

internal markets 478

leadership challenges 483–484, 494, 557–558

local government strategy 376–377

membership 551

Poll Tax 377–382

The Times’s attitude toward 550

Conservative Philosophy Group 475

Cook, Matthew 489

Cooper, Sir Frank 134, 139

Cork, Richard 373, 415, 458–462

Cowley, John 231

Cowling, Maurice 79

Cowton, Rodney 105, 539

Craine, Debra 449

Crawford Poole, Shona 201, 359

Credit cards 321–322

Crick, Bernard 133

Cries Unheard (Gitta Sereny) 515–516

Croatia 569–570, 573, 577

Cruden Investments 38, 41

Cudlipp, Hugh 40, 41, 277

Cudlipp, Michael 52

Currie, Edwina 515

Curtis, Richard 465

Czechoslovakia 355 see also Eastern Europe

D

Dacre, Lord (Hugh Trevor-Roper) 23, 50, 100, 168–180, 352, 627

Dacre, Paul 412–413, 416, 429

Daldry, Stephen 463

Daily Express 38, 40, 101, 143, 163, 188, 189, 307, 429, 516

Daily Mail 20, 189, 190–191, 209, 262, 272, 295, 381, 413, 429, 477, 507, 623

Daily Mirror 39–40, 132, 166, 189, 227, 390, 399, 408, 514, 516

Daily Mirror (Sydney) 33

Daily News 95

Daily Star 26, 136, 189

Daily Telegraph 3, 15, 26, 44, 51, 106, 128, 141, 158, 160, 165–166, 191–192, 214, 220, 224, 240–241, 295, 298, 305–306, 358, 421, 425, 426, 429–431, 434, 469, 516, 530–533, 632, 642

Daley, Janet 321

Dalyell, Tom 491

D’Ancona, Matthew 419, 485, 564–565

Darby, George 62

Dardanelles campaign 35–36

Davenport, Peter 275

David Holden Prize 147

Davies, Ron 553

Davis, Clive 452

Davy, Richard 159–160, 216

Dawson, Geoffrey 52, 482

Dawson-Scott, Robert 502

Day, Corinne 467

Dayton Accord 578, 579, 584 see also Bosnian War; Kosovo; NATO

de Blowitz, Henri 618

de Cuellar, Perez 133

de Lisle, Tim 360–361

Dean, Brenda 232, 236–238, 241–242, 244–246, 248–249, 265–267, 270, 276, 278–281, 284, 288, 290–291, 293, 364

Deedes, Lord (Bill) 166

Dejevsky, Mary 160, 347–349, 568, 640

Delaney, Michael 288–289

Delors, Jacques 343–344

Deng Xiaoping 350, 523, 525, 527

Dettmer, Jamie 390–391

di Giovanni, Janine 586, 588, 594, 603, 605, 640

Diamond, John 438

Diana, Princess of Wales 61–63, 142, 504, 513

Dickinson, Matt 521

Distillers Ltd 48–49

Dobson, Frank 487, 553–554

Docklands 222, 272–273, 298, 306

Domarus, Max 167

Donne, John 125

Donoughue, Bernard 55, 65, 80–81, 102–104, 106–108, 114, 117, 118, 418

Double Century: 200 Years of Cricket in The Times (ed. Marcus Williams) 207

Double-key stroking 13–14, 34

Douglas-Home, Charles

background 46, 141–144

on CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) 148

editor-in-waiting 46, 50, 52, 54, 95, 102–103, 105–107

and Evans’s leadership 105–106, 108

Good Times, Bad Times 112–113

marriage 144

as Times editor 416, 418

appointment 107, 109–111

assessment of editorship 213, 214–215, 216–217, 416

and the BBC 186–187

bicentenary celebrations 208–9

cancer and death 195, 211–217

Falklands War 123, 124–127, 129, 138, 158

finding supportive staff 195–198, 418

Hitler Diaries 169–171, 173–177, 179

increase in sales 192–3

labour disputes 156–161

leader writing policy 159–60

Murdoch’s influence 114, 160

and newspaper layout 140

and Ronald Reagan 146, 158

Thatcherite 158

Wapping 231 see also full listing for The Times

Douglas-Home, Jessica 144, 213, 216

Douglas-Home, Robin 142

Douglas-Home, William 127

Dougray, Ginny 551

Drace-Francis, Charles 537, 544

Drexel Burnham Lambert Bank 399

Driver, David 372, 410

Drogheda, Lord 627

Drugs 329–331, 454, 538–539, 542, 551

Dubbins, Tony 237, 267–268, 276–277, 280–282, 292, 293

Dubcek, Alexander 353

Duncan Smith, Iain 558

Durrant, Sabine 183

Dux, John 432

Dyke, Greg 535, 609

E

East is East (dir. Damien O’Donnell ) 465

East Germany 346, 350–353, 355 see also Eastern Europe

East Midlands Allied Press 62

East and West (Chris Patten) 530–531

Eastern Europe 215–216, 340, 346, 350–357, 403, 559 see also Baltic States; Czechoslovakia; East Germany; Hungary; Poland; Romania

Ebor, Nandor 154n

Ecclestone, Bernie 535

Ecclestone, Jacob 15–16, 27, 28, 155, 187, 253

Eddy, Paul 176

Editing and Design (Harold Evans) 49

Education Act (1988) 318–319

Edwards, Eddie ‘the Eagle’ 329

Edworthy, Sarah 183

EETPU (Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union) 156–157, 228, 231–232, 237, 240, 244, 248, 261, 287, 293

Egypt 152, 597

Ekberg, Peter 98

Eliot, T.S. 183–184

Elizabeth II, Queen 112, 209–210, 627, 634

Ellis, Terry 236

Elton, John 455

Emerson, Sally 417, 418

Emery, Fred 55, 66, 77, 81, 94, 95, 102–103, 105, 111, 127, 131, 136, 195

Emin, Tracy 459, 460

Employment Act (1980) 156, 226

Enders, Thomas 122, 126

The English Patient (dir. Anthony Minghella) 465

English, Shirley 501

English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Martin Wiener) 49

English National Opera 447

Eno, Brian 461

ERM (Exchange Rate Mechanism) 320, 344, 379–381, 472, 481

Euro-sceptics 344, 404, 473–475, 476, 485, 490, 493, 495

European Community 343, 358, 380, 403, 620 see also European Union

European Convention of Human Rights 517, 520

European Monetary System 69 see also ERM

European monetary union (EMU) 344, 358, 380–381, 403–404

European Union 475, 489–490, 498, 570 see also European Community

Evans, Harold

background 47–51

Active Newsroom 49

Editing and Design 49

Good Times, Bad Times 112–113, 117, 188–9, 217

and Israel 149

marriage 64

and the Mussolini hoax 168

negotiations for The Times purchase 31, 32, 34

in New York 116

and Poland 145–146

and Sunday Times 17, 18, 21–24

Murdoch’s influence 95–99, 101, 113–115, 118, 644

thalidomide campaign 48–49

supports Murdoch’s Wapping action 260

as Times editor

appointment 52

assessment of editorship 102, 104, 106–108, 111, 113–118

budget allocation 94–95

cold composition 87–88

Denis Thatcher’s planning application 113

dirty tricks 107

downfall 116–118

and Gerald Long 83–4, 96–98

growth strategy 52–53

incurring Thatcher’s displeasure 113–114

in the Law Courts 52–53

lead in petrol campaign 105, 539

leader column battles 103–105

leadership 44, 53–4, 58–9, 92–94, 102, 106–108, 140

‘maximum irritation’ theory 53, 118

Parliamentary Privileges 308–309

Portfolio 189–190

personal attacks and allegations 101–102

political position 64–69, 77, 79

redesigning the layout 59–61

royal wedding 62–63

staff changes 54–57, 109–115, 416, 418

transfer of TNL titles 98–100

‘vertical journalism’ theory 53, 117–118 see also the full listing for The Times

Evans, Michael 390, 392, 589, 603, 647

Evans, Reg 62

Evans, Richard 203, 308–309, 325

Evening Standard 20, 24, 135, 475

Express Newspapers 26 see also Daily Express; United Newspapers

Eyre, Richard 464

F

Faber Book of Reportage (John Carey) 154

Fair Trade Act (1973) 27

Faith and Power (Edward Mortimer) 149

Falklands War 79, 114, 118, 119–141, 152, 155, 205, 391

Fallon, Ivan 234, 298

Fantoni, Barry 200

Farrell, Stephen 585

Fat Boy Slim 456

Fayed, Dodi 504

Fayed, Mohammed 481

Feldman, Erik 190

Felton, David 258, 303

Fenton, James 182

Fieldhouse, Admiral Sir John 130

Financial Times 12, 18–19, 90, 91, 96, 128, 162, 163, 181, 192, 214, 220–221, 240, 273, 298, 306–307, 316, 322, 358, 380–381, 408, 410, 422, 426, 429

FT.com 471, 642

Finch, Hilary 449

Fischer, August 402, 432

Fish, Jonathan 328

Fisk, Robert 124, 150–155, 176, 333–338

Fitzgerald, Dr Garret 72

Fitzpatrick, Barry 98

Fleet, Kenneth 323–325

Fletcher, Martin 390

Flynn, David 432

Fletcher, Duncan 440

Follett, Toby 538–539, 541, 544

Foot, Michael 2, 33, 66, 76, 80–81, 114, 147, 163–165, 181, 314

Foot, Paul 142

Forbes, Brian 261

Ford, Richard 345, 373

Foster, Brendan 441

Foster, Jodie 59

Four Weddings and a Funeral (dir. Richard Curtis) 465

Fowler, Lord (Norman) 477

Fox, Norman 201–202, 325–326

Fox film and television 229, 297, 360, 399, 430

Franks, Alan 201

Franks Report 138

Fraser, Hugh 31

Frayn, Michael 463

Freedom Forum 531–532

Friedman, Milton 75

Frost, Bill 572

Fuchs, Vivian 121

Fukuyama, Francis 356, 559

The Full Monty (dir. Peter Cattaneo) 465

Fuller, Simon 455

G

Gaddafi, Colonel Muammar 334

Gallagher, Noel 455

Galliano, John 466

Gallipoli (dir. Peter Weir) 35–36

Galloway, George 317

Galtieri, General Leopoldo 121–122, 133 see also Argentina; Falklands War

Gang of Four see SDP

Garrick Club 57

Gascoigne, Paul 442

GCHQ Cheltenham 158

Geddes, Diana 76

Gemayel, Bashir 153

General Belgrano 131–133

General elections

(1979) 14

(1983) 162–164, 405

(1987) 312–318, 405

(1992) 346, 404–409

(1997) 487–493

(2001) 554–556

Genocide see Iraq; Kosovo; Rwanda; Serbia; Srebrenica massacre

Geraghty, Sean 156

Germany 350, 569 see also East Germany; Kohl, Helmut

Gibbs, Frances 373, 647

Giles, Frank 50, 54, 96, 98–99, 114, 128, 164, 173–175, 178

Giles (Sunday Express cartoonist) 270

Gillespie, Bill 231, 248

Gilligan, Andrew 521

Gilmour, Sir Ian 309

Giscard d’Estaing, Válery 69–70

Glasgow Herald 31

Gledhill, Ruth 647

Glendinning, Victoria 183

Glover, Stephen 240, 300–301, 411, 417, 432, 614

Glyndebourne 452

Goldsmith, Sir James 2, 17, 65, 488–489, 493

Gooch, Graham 326

Good Times, Bad Times (Harold Evans) 112–113, 117, 188–189, 217

Goodbody, John 325, 328, 330, 440–441

Goodwin, Noel 449

Goose Green 135–136

Gorbachev, Mikhail 147, 216, 318, 347–348, 351–352, 354, 357, 394, 567–568 see also Cold War; Gulf War; Reagan, Ronald; Russia; Soviet Union; Thatcher, Margaret

Gordon, Angela 199, 255, 258, 302

Gormley, Antony 462

Gould, Philip 553

Gove, Michael 485–487, 489–490, 501, 540, 547, 550–552, 565, 566–567

GPMU (Graphical, Paper and Media Union) 293

Graham, Katharine (Kay) 5–6, 230–231

Grainger, Percy 199

Grant, Hugh 465

Grant, John 94, 105, 195, 512, 639

Graves, David 123

Gray, John 356

Gray’s Inn Road

closure threat 35

demarcation rules 89, 294–295

Murdoch offers freehold to print unions 276–278, 281–282

new site talks 5, 223

poor morale 85, 102

print capacity 249

property assets 25

sold to ITN 297

TNL papers 19, 33, 52 see also Good Times, Bad Times; Print unions, industrial action/strikes

The Greatest Newspaper in the World! 208

Greene, Lord (Sidney) 23, 50, 100

Greenoak, Francesca 359

Griffin, Charles 56

Griffith-Joyner, Florence 331

Griffiths, Paul 449–450

Grigg, John 315, 339–340, 611, 632–633

Grimond, Lord (Jo) 30, 315

Gross, Michael 468

Grunwick dispute 226

Guardian 12, 18, 26, 51, 60, 61, 78, 79, 98, 101, 128, 140–141, 163, 191–192, 239, 273, 276, 305–306, 312, 370, 390, 410, 426, 429, 433, 531, 642

Guardian Unlimited 469, 471

Gulf War 388–398 see also Iraq

Gullikson, Tom 204

H

Haddad, Major Saad 154

Hague, William 494–495, 535, 537, 538, 540, 542–543, 545, 550–551, 556, 557

Hahn, Frank 66

Haig, Alexander 126, 129

Haley, Sir William 104, 239

Halliwell, Geri 456

Hama, Syria 150–151

Hamas 561

Hames, Tim 485, 540–541, 551, 556, 586, 648

Hamilton, Adrian 55, 81, 116, 162

Hamilton, Alan 260, 507

Hamilton, Neil 481, 491, 543

Hamilton, Sir Denis 7–8, 17, 19–20, 21–23, 28, 84, 87, 99, 116

choosing a Times editor 45–46, 48, 50

Wapping move 260

Hamlyn, Michael 372, 560

Hammond, Eric 231–232, 240, 244, 248, 261–262, 283, 293

Hammond, Professor Norman 262, 637

Hands, David 201, 327

Hanrahan, Brian 135

Happy Mondays 454

Hard Labour (Robert Kilroy-Silk) 339

Hardy, Bert 222–223, 255

Hare, David 115, 183, 463

Hargrove, Charles 69

Harrison, George 456

Harmsworth, Vere see Rothermere, 3rd Viscount

HarperCollins 182, 530

Harpers & Queen 101

Harris, Derek 616

Harris, Gillian 501

Harris, Robert 178

Harrow School 190

Hart, Gary 601

Hartwell, Lord (Michael Berry) 240–241, 300, 306

Harvey, Andrew 373

Harvey, Marcus 458

Hastings, Sir Max 135, 137, 140, 273, 300, 306, 339, 431, 477, 485

Hastings, Michael 183

Haughey, Charles 72

Havel, Vaclav 353, 357

Haviland, Julian 124, 162, 164, 311

Hawkes, Nigel 373, 468

Heald, Tim 183

Healey, Denis 82, 314

Healy, Pat 157, 164, 258, 260

Heath, Edward 31, 75, 78, 208, 528

Heath, Michael 100

Heidemann, Gerd 168–170, 172, 176, 180

Henderson, Sir Nicholas 176

Hendrie, Michael J. 637

Henman, Tim 441

Hennessy, John 203

Hennessy, Peter 4, 92, 108

Hensmann, Jan 170

Herald and Weekly Times Group 36, 38

Heren, Louis 3, 45–46, 51, 55, 105, 108, 618

Heseltine, Michael 222, 309–310, 379, 382–385, 489, 493–494

Heseltine, William 627

Hetherington, Alastair 166

Hick, Graeme 439

Hickey, Owen 46, 93, 96, 103–104, 339, 648

Hickey, William (Michael Leapman) 92, 101

Higgins, John 91, 198, 447, 449, 453, 632, 634

Higgins, Stuart 564

Hill, George 314

Hillier, Bevis 91

Hilton, Anthony 161

Hinckley, John 59

Hinton, Les 432, 527, 548, 598–599, 647

Hirst, Damien 459, 460

Hitler, Adolf 553–554

Hitler Diaries 167–180, 641

Hitler’s Speeches and Proclamations (Max Domarus) 167

Hoddle, Glen 521

Hogg, Sarah 303–304, 476

Hoggart, Paul 460

Hoggart, Simon 481

Holden, Anthony 55, 56, 60, 64, 81, 92, 102, 105, 107, 112, 117, 118, 418

Holmes, Richard 183

Holroyd, Michael 178

Holt, Oliver 443

Homosexuality 633–634

Honecker, Erich 346, 351

Hong Kong 503–504, 523, 525–529, 532–533

Hopkins, Michael 451

Hopkirk, Peter 145

Hornsby, Michael 355

Horton, Brian 55, 92, 94

Howard, Anthony 632–633, 635–636, 639–640

Howard, Michael 142, 488, 495, 518

Howard, Philip 92, 118, 181–183, 257, 261, 365, 371, 628

Howe, Darcus 74

Howe, Sir Geoffrey 65, 96, 319, 345, 381–382, 385–386, 528

Howson, Peter 574

Hoy, Mike 235, 246, 285, 303, 304, 360

Huckerby, Martin 73, 258–259

Hughes, Rob 443

Hughes, Simon 491

Hughes, Ted 462

Human Rights Act (1998) 517, 520

Hume, Cardinal Archbishop Basil 369

Hume, John 564

Humphries, Barry 178

Hungary 355 see also Eastern Europe

Hunnicutt, Gayle 369

Hunt, Rex 122

Hurd, Douglas 383, 384–385, 386, 525, 572

Hussain, Nasser 440

Hussein, Saddam 149, 386–390, 396–398, 561, 597 see also Gulf War; Iraq; Kuwait

Hussein, King of Jordan 125

Hussey, Lord (Marmaduke) 13–14, 50, 86, 89, 107, 283

I

Imperial War Museum 574

Independent 238, 240, 298, 300–304, 305–307, 312, 316, 333, 337, 357, 359, 363, 365, 370, 410, 411, 420–424, 427, 429–430, 433–434, 453, 607, 632, 643

Industrial action 1, 3, 5, 10–14, 48, 60, 81, 83, 85, 89, 152, 155–158, 163, 187, 219–220, 223–225 see also Murdoch; NGA; NUJ; SOGAT; The Times; Wapping

Ingham, Bernard 123, 310, 312, 318, 552

Ingrams, Richard 102

An Inspector Calls (Stephen Daldry) 463–4

Institute for Economic Affairs 65

Institute of Fiscal Studies 405

Institute of Journalists 155, 283

International Criminal Court 591, 595

Internet 468–471, 642–643

IPC (International Press Corporation) 40

IRA (Irish Republican Army) 70–72, 338, 499, 563–566 see also Adams, Gerry

Iran 387, 597–598

Iraq 149, 386–397, 481, 597 see also Gulf War

Ireland see Northern Ireland

Irvine, Derry (later Lord Chancellor) 255

Irving, David 168, 174, 177, 179

Isaacs, Jeremey 185

Isaacs, Tony 224, 231

Islam 150–151, 155

Intifada 560

fundamentalism 595–598, 604 see also al-Qaeda; bin Laden, Osama

Islamic Jihad 335, 561

Israel 149, 150–155, 334, 560–563 see also Middle East

Ivens, Martin 343, 394, 476, 485

Izetbegovic, Alija 568, 578

Izvestia 147

J

Jackson, General Sir Mike 589

Jacobs, Eric 28

Jacobson, Philip 390–391, 395

Jagger, Sir Mick 453

Jakobovits, Chief Rabbi Immanuel 177

James, Cathy 11

James, Edward 205

Jaruzelski, General Wojciech 145

Jay, Peter 68

Jenkins, Clive 56

Jenkins, David 330

Jenkins, Peter 128

Jenkins, Roy (Lord Jenkins of Hillhead) 76, 78, 79, 317

Jenkins, Simon

editor-in-waiting 364, 366

as Times columnist 471, 473, 476, 493, 571, 575, 601–604, 648

as Times editor

analysis of The Times 368–371, 374, 417, 418

assessment of editorship 413–415, 416

background 367–368

leader writers 374–375

Murdoch’s influence 645

obituaries 634

‘paper of choice’ 369–372

paper’s finances 363, 401–402

party for Michael Seely 203

sceptical Tory paper 374–375

standard of English 371–372, 435

three-year contract 411–415, 607 see also the full listing for The Times

Jiang Zemin 527–528, 532

JIC (Joint Intelligence Committee) 122

John Paul II, Pope 136, 146

Johnson, Ben 329–330

Johnson, Boris 341

Johnson, Daniel 353, 357, 375, 419, 421, 462, 476, 485–486

Johnson, Frank 56, 59, 65, 79, 91, 117, 118, 164–165, 339

Johnson, Paul 17, 65, 96, 213, 254, 477

Jones, Colonel ‘H’ 135

Jones, Richard 451

Jones, Stuart 205–206

Jones, Tim 72

Jones, Wyn 279

Joseph, Lord (Keith) 65

Journalists of The Times (JOTT) 4, 111

Junor, Sir John 113, 366

K

Kabila, Laurent 583

Kahan Commission 154

Kaletsky, Anatole 373, 381, 404–405, 408, 415, 423, 473, 486, 489, 492, 499, 604

Kapoor, Anish 462

Karadzic, Radovan 575

Karzai, Hamid 605

Kasparov, Garry 421

Kaufman, Gerald 37, 163

Kavanagh, Professor Dennis 316

Keating, Harry 183

Keating, John 231, 242

Keays, Sarah 165

Kee, Robert 141

Keene, Raymond 421, 638

Kellner, Peter 133, 263

Kelly, David 521

Kelly, Rachel 481

Kelner, Simon 643

Kemsley, Lord (James Gomer Berry) 19

Kennedy, Dominic 537

Kennedy, John F. 58

Kennedy, Edward 204

Kenny, Dr Anthony 144, 208

Kent, Monsignor Bruce 148

Kervin, Alison 444

Keys, Bill 33

Khomeini, Ayatolah 597

Kiley, Sam 579–583, 585

Kilroy-Silk, Robert 338–339

Kingston, Miles 56, 117, 261, 303, 629

Kinnock, Glenys 165, 315

Kinnock, Neil 165, 213, 262, 265, 277, 290, 314, 315, 317, 364, 376, 394, 405–408

Kirkpatrick, Jeane 126

Kissinger, Henry 64

Knight, Andrew 241, 247, 299, 306, 363–364, 367, 401–402, 412, 424, 432, 435

Knightley, Philip 173

Knipe, Michael 390

Koch, Peter 170, 176

Kogan, David and Maurice 80

Kohl, Helmut 352, 403, 529

Kosovo 584–590 see also Bosnian War; Dayton Accord; Kosovo; NATO; Serbia

Kostunica, Vojislav 590

Krenz, Egon 351–352

Kujau, Konrad 168, 170, 180

Kuwait 386–389, 394–395, 560–561, 597 see also Gulf War; Hussein, Saddam; Iraq

L

Labour Party 2, 76, 78, 80–82, 148, 160, 162–164, 262–263, 290, 302, 338, 376, 379, 380, 382 see also Blair, Tony; Foot, Michael; Kinnock, Neil

Clause Four removal 483

funding arrangements 535

general elections

(1983) 162–164, 405

(1987) 312–8, 405–407

(1992) 404–409

(1997) 487–493

(2001) 554–556

Government and spin 552–553

euro decision deferred 498

New Deal 498

and The Times 552

Times endorsement 556

Lamb, Larry 43, 47

Lamont, Lord (Norman) 405, 472, 475

Landy, Michael 461

Lara, Brian 440

Laski, Harold 18

The Last Proconsul (Charles Douglas-Home) 143

Law, Peter 355

Lawrence, John 183

Lawrence, Stephen (Lawrence Inquiry) 75

Lawson, Dominic 380

Lawson, Nigel (Lord Lawson of Blaby) 67, 133, 162, 314, 319, 322, 344–346, 421

Lawson, Nigella 466

Le Page, John 123

Le Page, Robert 183

Leapman, Michael 6, 73, 92, 94

Lebanon 149, 150–155, 334–336, 597

Ledbetter, Diana 359

Lee, Alan 440

Lee Williams, Professor Geoffrey 571

Leiven, Anatole 592

Lennon, John 456

Lennon, Peter 185

Lester, Anthony 264

Levin, Bernard 57, 91, 144–145, 163, 166, 218, 260, 273, 274, 341–342, 357, 371, 454, 486, 507–508, 525, 533, 647

Levin, Jeremy 335

Lewin, Admiral Sir Terence 137

Lewis, Carl 330–331

Lewis, Derek 495

Liberal Democrats 317, 481, 488, 494

Liberal Party 78, 163, 317, 380 see also Liberal Democrats

Life in Russia (Michael Binyon) 147

Lilley, Peter 488, 495, 551

Linford, Dick 437

Linklater, Magnus 501

Lipsey, David 372

Lipsky, Seth 158–159

Lister, David 517, 519–520

Livingstone, Ken 55, 80, 376, 553–554

Lloyd, Cathie 280

Lloyd Webber, Andrew 183

London Daily News 307

London Post 230, 234–236, 242–243, 246

Long, Gerald 79, 83–84, 86, 94, 96–98, 100, 109, 110, 171

Longley, Clifford 258, 285–287, 363, 371, 375, 401, 418–419

Lonhro mining company 30, 31

Look Back in Anger (John Osborne) 463

Loutchansky, Grigori 517–521

Lownes, Frederick 636

Loyd, Anthony 572–574, 576–577, 586, 592–594, 603–605, 640

Lucas, Sarah 459

Luce, Richard 122, 264

Lumley, Joanna 201

Lurie, Ranan 56, 200

M

Maastricht 403, 472–475, 569

MacArthur, Brian 52, 55, 60, 78, 95, 105, 169, 175–177, 240, 273, 504, 534, 626

MacArthur, Jenny 444

MacBride, Sean 338

McCarthy, Michael 468

McDonagh, Martin 463

Macdonald, Donald 328

McElvoy, Anne 352–353, 357, 485

McEnroe, John 204–205

McGahey, Mick 188

McGee, Alan 455

McGregor, Ewan 465

McGregor, Lord (John) 513

Macgregor-Morris, Pamela 444

McIntosh, Andrew 80

Macintyre, Ben 599

McIntyre, Don 256, 258, 261, 263, 303

MacKenzie, Kelvin 132, 332

Mackilligin, David 538

MacLeod, Alasdair 426

MacLeod, Angus 501

MacManus, James 436–437

MacMillan, James 450

McNally, Lord (Tom) 434

Macpherson, Conor 463

McQueen, Alexander 466

MacQuitty, Jane 359, 622

McVicar, David 451

MAD (mutually assured destruction) 148

Madden, John 465

Maddock, David 443

Maddox, Bronwen 527, 620, 624, 648

Madonna 451

Mail on Sunday 20, 174, 301

Mair, John 501

Major, John 345, 380–381, 383, 384–385, 390, 398, 403–404 see also Conservative Party

Back to Basics campaign 481

and China 524, 526, 527

Citizen’s Charter 478

Edwina Currie affair 515

Downing Street peace accord 564–565

ERM (Exchange Rate Mechanism) 472–473

Euro-sceptics 475–476

general elections

(1992) 404–408

(1997) 488–493

IRA mortar bomb 563

leadership challenge 484–485

Maastricht treaty 474–475

and Thatcherism 477–478

unpopularity 475–477, 481–482

Mancroft, Lord (Benjamin) 208

Mandarin see Phillips, Michael

Mandela, Nelson 560, 567

Mandelson, Peter 262, 314, 406–407, 535

Marc see Boxer, Mark

Marber, Patrick 463

Marlowe, Lara 336

Marnham, Patrick 92

Marr, Andrew 365, 419

Marsh, Sir Richard 2

Martin-Jenkins, Christopher 440

Marxism Today 280

The Mask of Orpheus (Harrison Birtwistle) 450

Masters, Anthony 184

Mates, Michael 481

Mather, Ian 123

Matthews, Bruce 225, 228, 231–232, 236–237, 245, 247, 261, 278, 282–283, 292, 304

Matthews, Lord (Victor) 40

Maxwell, Robert 2, 17, 25, 33, 39–40, 115, 238, 239, 273, 365, 390, 535

May, Derwent 202, 638

Meades, Jonathan 359–360, 622

Media Week 433

Mellor, David 481, 513

Melvern, Linda 242

Menendez, General Mario 140

Mendes, Sam 464

Menkes, Suzy 201, 303, 361

Merchant-Ivory productions 465

Messenger Newspaper Group 227, 240

Metromedia 399

Meyer, Sir Christopher 564

Meyer, Sir Anthony 346

Michael, Alun 553–554

Middle East 333–337, 560 see also Egypt; Israel; Lebanon; Palestine; Saudi Arabia; Suez; Syria

Miles, Alice 624

Miles, Bill 237, 245, 290–291

Milken, Michael 399

Miller, David 201, 326–327, 329

Miller, Jonathan 183, 449

Millington, Barry 449

Milne, Alasdair 186

Milner, Clive 85

Milnes, Rodney 373, 415, 450–452

Milosevic, Slobodan 568–569, 575, 577–578, 584–585, 588–589

Miners’ strike 187–188, 209

Minford, Professor Patrick 67

Minghella, Anthony 465

Mirror Group 27, 238–239, 307, 365, 430 see also Daily Mirror

Mirsky, Jonathan 523–525, 527–529, 531–534, 607, 623

Mitterrand, François 69–70, 126, 403, 474

Mobutu, (Joseph) Mobutu Sese Seko 583

Modiano, Mario 82

Le Monde 4, 61

Monopolies and Mergers Commission 19, 24, 25, 27–30, 31–33, 104, 361, 429

Montgomery, David 385

Montgomery-Massingberd, Hugh 632

Moore, Charles 485, 516, 531

Moore, General J.J. 140

Moorehead, Caroline 144

Moran, Caitlin 457

More 30

Morgan, John 438–439

Morgan, Rhodri 554

Morison, Stanley 60, 63, 410

Morning Star 156, 263, 264

Morrell, Frances 628

Morris, James (Jan) 154n

Morrison, Richard 373, 447–451

Moss, Kate 467

Mortimer, Edward 149, 152, 153, 159–160, 216

Morton, Andrew 462, 513

Motion, Andrew 462, 552

Muirhead Data Communications 12

Muldoon, Robert 126

Murdoch, Anna 115

Murdoch, Sir Keith 35–36, 38, 646 see also Northcliffe, Lord (Alfred)

Murdoch, (Keith) Rupert

background 36–42

media empire/purchases/shares

Adelaide TV channels 38

The Australian 22, 39, 41, 646

Chicago Sun-Times 217, 235–236

co-finances Gallipoli 35–36

Cruden Investments 38, 41

Fox film and television 229, 297, 360, 399, 430

Los Angeles Dodgers 531

News of the World 39

pan-China satellite TV empire 524, 529, 534, 644

Perth Sunday Times 38

Reuters shareholding 238–9

scale of international commitments 645

Sky television 186, 360–361, 399, 401, 411, 426, 427, 442–444

South China Morning Post 529, 646

Sydney Daily Mirror 33

Today 307, 381, 428

TNL purchase 1–2, 6–9, 17, 19–29, 32, 40, 100 see also News of the World; Sun; Sunday Times; The Times; Times Educational Supplement; Times Higher Education Supplement; Times Literary Supplement

transfer of TNL titles 99–100

TV sports deal 327 see also News Corporation; News International Ltd.; News Limited

and Israel 149

mastery of journalistic craft 26, 37, 39–40, 49

and the monarchy 7, 507

political orientation 21–23, 43, 164, 492, 644

and Reagan 146

profile 44

and the SDP 76–77

and Thatcher 28–29, 43, 113–114, 186

and The Times

Ashcroft affair 543, 546

bicentenary 207–210

choosing editors 45–47, 217–218, 368–369, 416, 607 see also The Times, editors: Douglas-Home, Charles; Evans, Harold; Rees-Mogg, William; Stothard, Peter; Wilson, Charles

Douglas-Home’s cancer 211, 213–214, 548

‘dumbing down’ 38, 40–42, 189, 531, 613–625

East and West (Chris Patten) 530–531

editorial influence 21, 26, 38–39, 41–44, 59, 83, 85, 96, 114–116, 186–187, 298, 337, 532, 534

and Evans showdown 101, 102–103, 105–112, 114, 116

Hitler Diaries 168, 170–173, 175, 178–180

nuts and bolts newspaperman 645

price cutting 422–430

purchase of The Times 1–2, 6–9, 17, 19–29, 32, 40, 100

reasons for saving The Times 646–647

Sherwood’s offer 99

Stothard’s cancer 548

and trade unions 35, 89, 90, 187–188, 276–278, 281–282 see also full listing for The Times

and Wapping

computer technology 231, 233–234, 236, 247, 258

distribution 233, 244, 250, 265–266, 278

first edition 256–257

increase in profitability 297–298

Innovation Special 248

London Post 230, 234–236, 242–243, 246

moving day 250–252

planning the move 228–230

conspirators 231–238, 246–248

praise for Murdoch 259–260, 273

price of victory 292–299

public opinion 270–276

siege/pickets/intimidation 255–260, 267–270, 274, 278–280, 282–287, 289–292, 301–302

subsequent fallout 301–304, 307

union negotiations 231–238, 242–246, 248–256, 276–288

Murmuring Judges (David Hare) 463

Murray, Ian 70

Murray, Len 35, 90

Muscat, Julian 441

Muslim brotherhood 597 see also Islam, fundamentalism

Muslim-Croat federation 574–575 see also Bosnian War

N

Nadir, Asil 481

NAPP Systems 236

National Council for Civil Liberties 280

National Lottery 446–447, 465

NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) 160, 352

Bosnian war 571, 575–576

Implementation Force (IFOR) 578

K-For 589–590

Kosovo 584–589

non-aggression treaty 559

Sarajevo bombing 574

NATSOPA (National Society of Operative Printers, Graphical and Media Personnel) 10, 33, 34, 88–89, 100

Neale, Greg 251, 253–254, 256, 258

Neil, Andrew 115, 228, 234, 248, 283, 289, 332, 627

Neill Committee 535, 541

Nellist, Dave 384

Netanyahu, Benjamin 562

New Order 453

New Society 629

New Statesman 47, 128, 133, 215, 270

New York Post 6, 21, 41–42, 44, 95

New Yorker 369

News Corporation

advertising market 606

East and West (Chris Patten) 530

financial difficulties 95, 360–361, 364, 366, 399–401, 413, 426

Hitler Diaries 167, 171–173, 178

profits 229, 246, 297–298, 426, 432

saving The Times 646–647

share value 41

and TNL 99

TV sports deal 327 see also News International Limited

News Group Newspapers (NGN) 25, 41, 231

News International Limited

ASLEF dispute 83

boycotts 263–265, 273–274

cover prices 193, 411, 423, 426–432

departure of journalists 302–303, 368

ex-gratia payments 278, 280–281

job cuts 33, 34–35, 297

market share of sales 27–29, 238

operating income 399

price versus quality 423–424

profits 95, 116, 219, 297–298, 362, 411, 426, 432

purchase of TNL 25, 48, 86

share value 41, 99, 297

transfer of TNL titles 98–99

Wapping 227–230, 232–235, 237, 243–246, 255, 261, 263, 267–269, 271, 285, 287–288, 290–291 see also Hitler Diaries; News Corporation

News Limited 38, 40

News on Sunday 277, 307

News of the World 9, 21, 25, 27, 39, 42, 85, 99, 219, 222, 229, 231, 235, 242, 244, 253, 255, 492 see also Bouverie Street

Newspaper Publishers Association (NPA) 2, 7, 10, 156, 238

Newspaper Publishing Limited 427 see also Independent

Newsweek 171–172

Newton, Gordon 189

Newton, Maxwell 39

NGA (National Graphical Association) 2, 10, 12–14, 25, 33, 87, 89–90, 98, 156, 163, 220, 253–254, 274 see also print unions

mergers 293

Murdoch offers Gray’s Inn Road freehold 276–277

Wapping 225, 227–229, 236–237, 242–245, 248–250, 267, 270, 278, 280–282, 287, 291

NHS (National Health Service) 156

Nicholls of Birkenhead, Lord (Donald) 518

Nichols, Peter 183

Nicholson, Dr Richard 330

Nicholson, Michael 135

Nicol, Angus 638

Nield, Robert 66

Nightingale, Benedict 373, 448, 462–464

Ninagawa, Yukio 183

Nirvana 454

Noble, Adrian 464

Nolan Report 481

Norbury, Tony 117, 256, 292

Norman, Geraldine 107, 111, 208, 624

Norris, Steve 554

North Korea 329, 522–523

Northcliffe, Lord (Alfred) 4, 20, 35–36, 42, 646

Northern Echo 47–48

Northern Ireland 150, 336, 563–566

Northern Ossetia 591

Notes from a Small Island (Bill Bryson) 88

Nott, John 120, 122, 125, 363

Notting Hill (dir. Richard Curtis) 465

Nuclear

deterrents 148

disarmament 160, 163, 348

waste 308

weapons 149, 348

NUJ (National Union of Journalists) 15, 25–26, 32, 83, 155, 186, 190, 227, 234, 248–251, 253–254, 255–256, 257–265, 275, 285–287, 291, 294, 302, 340

NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) 187

Nunn, Trevor 183–184, 464

NUR (National Union of Railwaymen) 156, 250

Nuttall, Nick 468

O

Oakley, Robin 311–315, 317, 318, 345–346, 382–383, 385, 404, 407, 419

Oasis 454–455

O’Brien, Conor Cruise 315, 357, 397

O’Brien, Owen 33

Observer 5, 31–32, 40, 98, 163, 174, 191, 274, 302, 428, 523, 531

OFT (Office of Fair Trading) 427–428, 432–434

Oil prices 386, 388

Olympic Games 329–331, 444–445, 625

O’Neill, Bill 33–34, 88, 115, 194, 224–226, 242–244, 248–249, 261, 287, 290–291–3, 432

Operation Desert Storm 391–393 see also Gulf War; Iraq; Hussein, Saddam; Kuwait

Oppenheim, Sally 28

Orange Order 565–566

Osborne, John 183, 463

OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) 584

Osman, Arthur 155

O’Sullivan, John 339

O’Sullivan, Sally 366

Outrams 31

Ovett, Steve 204

Owen, David 76, 314, 317–318, 396, 570

Owen, Frank 181

Owen, Richard 147, 390, 525, 619

P

Packer, Kerry 327, 440

Page, Bruce 47, 48, 128, 215

Pakistan 597

Palestine 149, 152–153, 335, 561–563 see also PLO

Pannick, David 264

Panorama 101, 165

Parker, Sir Peter 205

Parkinson, Cecil 113–114, 125, 165–166

Parris, Matthew 342–343, 366, 384, 385–386, 406–407, 419, 476, 482, 483–484, 494, 552, 555–556, 611, 648

Parsons, Sandra 548–549, 600, 606, 623–624

Parsons, Sir Anthony 125, 387–388

Patel, Aurobind 410

Paterson, Graham 165, 343, 362, 390, 476–477, 533, 547

Paterson, Peter 272

Patten, Chris 525–526, 528, 530–532, 565

Paul, Sandra 142

Peacock Inquiry 186

Pearce, Edward 366

Pearson group 19

Pearson, Simon 436

Penning-Rowsell, Edmund 96

Peres, Shimon 250, 561–562

Perrick, Penny 201

Peru 133

Peterborough, Bishop of 208

Pettit, Stephen 449

Phillips, Michael 202–203

Pickering, Sir Edward 37–38, 40, 49, 50, 164, 171, 210, 215, 510–511, 645

Pickering, Ron 330

Pierce, Andrew 476–477, 494, 538

Pigott, Richard 167

Pilpel, Leon 127, 198, 626–627

Pimlott, Ben 315, 338

Pinochet, Augusto 595

Pinsent, Sir Matthew 445

Pinter, Harold 463

Pithart, Peter 144

Pitt, Bill 78

Pittsburgh National Bank 400

Plath, Sylvia 462

PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) 151, 152–153, 561

Plommer, Leslie 153

Poland 145–146, 350, 355

Pole-Carew, Christopher 221, 231–232, 236

Porter, Barry 31

Portillo, Michael 484, 485, 504, 550–551, 557–558, 600

Potter, Sarah 444

Powell, Enoch 68, 108, 556

Pravda – A Fleet Street Comedy (David Hare) 115, 183

Prentice, Eve-Ann 588–589

Prescott, John 555

Press Association 164, 250, 552

Press censorship 163–164

Press Council/Complaints Commission 511–514, 516

Preston, Ben 539, 547, 549–550, 606, 608

Preston, Peter 128, 305–306, 431

Pride, Tom 436

Prime, Tony 123

Prince 456

Pringle, James 523, 527, 533

Print unions 10–13, 25

closed shops 86–89, 155–156, 193–194, 219–220, 239–240, 243

computer technology 13, 86–88, 229, 231, 233–234

double-key stroking 13–14, 34, 229, 242, 244

industrial action/strikes 1, 3, 5, 10–14, 48, 60, 81, 83, 85, 89, 152, 155–158, 163, 186–187, 219–220, 223–225, 230, 239, 243–245, 248–250

legally binding contracts 244–245

Murdoch offers Gray’s Inn Road freehold 276–278, 281–282

redundancies 272

and TNL sale 31–34

Wembley rally 265 see also Gray’s Inn Road; Murdoch; NGA; NUJ; SOGAT; Wapping

Prior, James 29, 72, 156

Private Eye 59–60, 101–102, 112, 196

The Prodigy 456

Proops, Marjorie 78

Property boom 320–321

Pulp Fiction (dir. Quentin Tarantino) 464

Punch and Judy (Harrison Birtwistle) 450

Purves, Libby 624

Putin, Vladimir 593

Pym, Francis 125, 129, 133

Pysariwsky, Zoriana 124

Q

Quinton, Lord (Anthony) 181–182

R

Rabin, Yitzhak 561–562

Race Today 74

Racing Demons (David Hare) 463

Railton, Jim 328

Ramsay, Alix 441

Randall, Jeff 543–544, 546

Random House 182

Raphael, Isabel 183

Ratcliffe, Michael 181

Rattle, Sir Simon 448

Raynsford, Nick 262

Reagan, Ronald 58, 67, 133, 146, 148, 155, 160, 213, 215–216, 348, 597

Recession 380, 399, 404–405, 422–423, 472–473

Redgrave, Sir Steven 445

Redwood, John 484, 489, 494

Reed, John 400

Rees-Mogg, William

and Blair 497

Evans’s downfall 117

‘How to Kill a Newspaper’ 16

on judging news 641–642

Maastricht treaty 474–475

and Major 477, 492

and Murdoch 7, 37, 44, 259

and the sale of The Times 3–7, 18, 21–23, 31

as Times columnist 419–420, 423, 514, 552, 608

as Times editor 52, 53–54, 57, 61, 66, 76, 78, 105, 114, 474

Times Europe edition 14

transfer of TNL titles 100

Referendum Party 488

Reich, Steve 450

Reichmann, Paul 324

Reservoir Dogs (dir. Quentin Tarantino) 464

Reuters 7, 84, 238–239, 335

Reynolds Defence (Albert Reynolds) 518–521, 564

Rhodes, Tom 572

Rice, Tom 228, 232

Richards, Geoffrey 98, 235, 245, 248, 266, 290, 292

Riddell, Peter 55, 408–409, 415, 419, 476, 489, 499, 617, 648

Ridley, Nicholas 120, 377, 379–380

Righter, Rosemary 350, 389, 390, 394, 485–486, 526, 562, 567, 586, 608, 624, 648

Riley, John 264

Rippon, Geoffrey 100

Robbins, Chris 269, 271

Robbins Report 76, 105

Robens, Lord (Alfred) 23, 50, 109, 110, 115

Roberts, Anthony 461

Roberts, Peter 372, 435, 437, 608

Robertson, George 263

Robertson QC, Geoffrey 539

Robinson, David 184–185

Robinson, Geoffrey 30, 535

Robinson, Jeffrey 517

Robinson, Mary 564

Robson, Andrew 639

Roche, Billy 463

Rodgers, Bill 76, 164, 317

Roll, Lord (Eric) 23, 30, 31, 50

Romania 353–356

The Romans in Britain (Howard Brenton) 115

A Room with a View (dir. James Ivory) 185

Rosewell, Mike 328

Rothermere, Lord (Harold) 20–21, 22, 24, 272, 412

Routledge, Paul 187–188, 209, 258, 260, 302

Roux, Albert 97

Rowland, Tiny 2, 17, 31–32, 40, 274

Roxburgh, Angus 347

Royal Commission on the Press 6

Royal Geographical Society 121

Royal Opera House 447, 451

Ruda, Mike 85

Rudd, Alyson 443–444

Ruddock, David 414, 435–436, 547, 552, 608

Rusbridger, Alan 426, 469, 520

Ruskin College 274–275

Russell, William Howard 154n 618

Russia 568, 591–593 see also Soviet Union

Rwanda 581–584

S

Saatchi, Lord Charles 458, 460

Saatchi & Saatchi 43

Samaranch, Juan Antonio 326

Sampras, Pete 442

Sampson, Anthony 78

Sampson, Catherine 349, 523

Sands, Bobby 71, 635

Satellite television 185–186, 360–361, 399, 427, 429, 432, 442–444 see also Sky television; Star TV

Saudi Arabia 388–389, 596

Scargill, Arthur 188, 209, 293

Scarman, Lord (Scarman Report) 73–75

Schiff, Dorothy 41

Schmidt, Helmut 70, 353

Schwarzkopf, General Norman 395, 396

Scotland

devolution 499

Holyrood Parliament 501–502

Times edition 500–502

Scott, Peter 121

Scott Report 481

Scottish Daily Express 143

Scowcroft, Brent 354

Scruton, Roger 144, 159

SDP (Social Democratic Party) 76–79, 82, 102, 114, 163–164, 317–318

Seamark, Mick 136

Searby, Richard 21, 35, 99–100, 109, 115, 171

Searjeant, Graham 161–162, 324, 415

Seeber, Liz 88, 106–107, 129, 212, 252

Seely, Michael 202

Selbourne, David 274–275

Selling Hitler (Robert Harris) 178

Serbia 568–571, 576–577, 590 see also Bosnian War; Dayton Accord; Kosovo; NATO

Sereny, Gitta 168–169, 515–516

Sergeant, John 311

Shackleton, Lord (Edward) 121

Shah, Eddy 227–228, 238–240, 273, 298, 301

Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden) 465

Shakespeare, Nicholas 453

Sharon, Ariel 154, 563

Shea, Michael 627

Shearer, Alan 442

Sheehan, Robert 638

Sheffield, HMS 132–133

Sherwood, James 99

Shields, Mick 21

Shore, Peter 223, 308

Short, Clare 158, 394

Short, Nigel 421

Siberian gas pipeline 146

Sieghart, Mary Ann 362–363, 366, 375, 447, 483, 485, 487, 492, 556, 624

Sierra Leone 583

Siete Dias 119

Silkin, John 81–82

Sinclair, David 453–456344, 403, 473

Single currency see also ERM; EMU

Sinn Fein 499, 564–566 see also IRA

Sino-British Declaration 525

Sir Galahad 136

Sir Tristram 136

Skinner, Dennis 290, 539

Sky television (British Sky Broadcasting) 186, 360–361, 399, 401, 411, 426, 427, 442–444

Sloman, Sir Albert 275

Slovenia 569

Smith, Geoffrey 103, 107

Smith, John 29, 32, 100, 405, 408, 482, 499

Smith, Mel 190

The Smiths 453

Smylie, Ben 234

Snoddy, Raymond 263, 304, 426, 531

Snow, Peter 128

Sobers, Garfield 440

SOGAT (Society of Graphical and Allied Trades) 10, 33, 86, 88, 148–149, 156–158, 220, 224–228, 232–233, 236, 241–242, 244–245, 248–250, 253, 265–269, 270–271, 278–284, 287–288, 290–291, 293 see also print unions

Solidarity Movement 145, 350–351

Somalia 579–581

Sorge, Wilfried 169–171

South Africa 124, 159, 560, 566, 583, 627

South China Morning Post 529, 646

South Georgia 121–123, 129

South Korea 329

Soviet Union (USSR) 146–147, 159, 186–187, 215–216, 347–348, 350, 355, 357, 403, 567–568 see also Russia

The Spectator 17, 65, 96, 100, 108, 118, 213, 254, 260, 475, 633

Spice Girls 455–456

Spicer, Sir Michael 475

Der Spiegel 172

Spitting Image 481

Srebrenica massacre 575–576 see also Bosnian War; NATO; UN

La Stampa 61

Stanhope, Henry 120, 124, 136–137

Star TV 429, 529–530

Steel, David 314

Stelzer, Irwin 412

Stephenson, Hugh 45, 51, 55, 101, 160, 274

Stern magazine 167–174, 176–180

Steven, Stewart 475

Stevens, Lord (David) 239, 272

Stoessel, Walter 126

Stone, Professor Norman 178, 352

Stone Roses 454

Stoppard, Tom 183

Stothard, Peter

‘bourgeois triumphalism’ 313

Op-Ed commissions 158–159, 198

print room visit 221

‘promising’ journalist 55, 102, 117, 201, 304, 417

US editor 362, 390

Wapping strike 250

principal leader writer 648

as Times editor

appointment 412–413

assessment of editorship 607–609

background 416–417

Ashcroft affair 536–546

cancer treatment 547–548, 551

and China 523–534

Conservative Philosophy Group 475

‘dumbing down’ 613–614

editorial structure 436

election year (1997) 487–492

endorses Labour 556–557

and John Major 476, 488–490

leaders 648

literary editor 462

Murdoch’s influence 114, 531–534, 645

newspaper pricing 428, 431–432

obituaries 634

online edition 469–470

and Princess Diana 505–506

sackings 418–419

staff re-shuffle 546–547

stands down 607–609

and Tony Blair 483

trainee scheme 340–341

war on terror 602

Times Literary Supplement editor 608 see also the full listing for The Times

Strafford, Peter 120–121, 198

Straw, Jack 263, 338, 518

Strong, Roy 182

Stuart-Smith, Mr Justice (Sir Murray) 287

Stuttaford, Dr Thomas 117, 468

STV (Scottish Television) 9

Sudan 598

Suez 138

Sun 22, 25, 30, 33, 41–43, 77, 647 see also Bouverie Street

and ASLEF 83, 250

bingo 189

circulation 27, 40, 263, 399

Evans’s thalidomide campaign 48–49

Falklands War 123–124, 128, 129, 131, 141

finances 9

general election (1992) 408

journalists’ salaries 285–286

Kinning Park Plant 226

price cut 424–425

and Princess Diana 507

print unions 99

tabloid excesses 367

Versace’s murder 466

Wapping 85, 219, 222, 225–226, 229, 235, 242, 244, 253, 268

Sun-Times see Chicago Sun-Times

Sunday Express 270

Sunday Sport 512

Sunday Times

book reviews 181

circulation 27, 51, 86, 180, 271, 422

election campaign (1983) 164

finances 84–85, 422

Hitler Diaries 168, 173–176, 178, 180

industrial relations 1, 12, 20, 86, 89, 98, 219

Innovation Special 248

‘the journalists’ paper’ 118

and Murdoch 26

Mussolini diaries 168

the Queen and Thatcherism 627

sale 1–3, 6, 18–22, 25, 29, 32

Wapping 234–235, 242, 247–249, 253, 255

Sunday Today 307

Sunni fundamentalism 150

Swann, Sir Michael 4

Sykes, Paul 490

Symonds, Matthew 240, 300–301

Syria 150–152, 155

T

Taheri, Amir 388–389, 597

Taleban 598, 602–605

Tanjug (news agency) 354

Tarantino, Quentin 464

Tavener, John 450

Taylor, Edwin 60, 62

Taylor, Graham 326

Taylor, Ken 226

Tebbit, Norman 309

Terry, Anthony 168, 176

TGWU (Transport and General Workers Union) 233, 250, 266

Thalidomide controversy 48–49

Thatcher, Denis 113

Thatcher, Margaret 14, 28–29, 43, 68, 75, 113–114, 213

Bosnian war and the arms embargo 571

carbon emissions 469

East Germany 352–353

Evans and the Sport Council 113–114

Exchange Rate Mechanism 320, 344–346

Falklands War 120, 122, 124–126, 129, 133, 137, 138

general elections 14, 162–164, 312–316, 318, 346

German reunification 358

leadership challenge 366, 374, 379–384

Lebanon war 155

and the miners 75

monetarist policies 627

and the Monopolies Commission 28–32

and moral high ground 166

and Murdoch 28–29, 43, 113–114, 186

Privileges Committee 309

South African sanctions 627

tribute to Douglas-Home 213

Westland Helicopters 310

Thatcherite policies 65–68, 71, 73, 75, 78, 160–162, 186–187, 215, 265, 293–294, 312–313, 318–320, 343–346, 376–388

‘The Times at 200’ 208

Thomas, Christopher 71–72, 124, 131, 598

Thompson, E.P. 127

Thomson British Holdings 7, 17 see also Thomson Organisation

Thomson, Kenneth (2nd Baron Thomson of Fleet) 17–18, 83

Thomson Organisation

finances 2, 4–5, 8, 14

sale of Times/Sunday Times 1–5, 9, 16–19, 25, 28–30, 32

Thomson, Robert 524, 534

Times editor 607, 623

Thomson, Roy (1st Baron Thomson of Fleet) 3, 7–11, 17, 24, 27, 40, 41, 89, 116, 192–193

Thornton, Clive 277

Thornton, Michael 634

Tieman, Ross 616

Time magazine 518

Time Out 60

The Times (please see main index for additional page references)

Business concerns and management

advertising 42, 84–85, 90, 192, 194, 263–264, 272, 307, 421, 424–425, 430, 437, 470–471, 549, 605

Archive and Record Centre 510, 520–521

bicentenary 206–210

boycotts 263–265, 267, 338, 370

circulation 4, 15, 27, 41, 51–52, 63, 90, 117, 141, 189, 191–192, 194, 198, 206, 263, 271–272, 305–306, 358, 411, 423–425, 433–435, 437, 614

consequences of Wapping revolution 301–304, 307

cover price 272, 411, 422–435, 437

innovation and expansion 294–299

‘La Lumiere’, new office 509–510

marketing 420–421

mergers 18–19

Microsoft deal 432–433

no-smoking policy 436

Portfolio competition 189–194, 425

readership 49, 610–613

redundancies 98–100, 110, 113, 116, 161, 402

Sale and purchase by Murdoch 1–7, 6–9, 17–23, 25, 26, 28–31, 32, 40, 100, 188, 308–9, 363, 401–402 see also Times Newspapers Limited

tabloid press bingo war 189

Coverage

Business news

‘Big Bang’ 323–324

Black Wednesday 477

monetarism 65–70, 75, 114, 160–161, 319–320, 627

Sky TV 360–361

Education

higher 75–76, 479–480

Ofsted 478–479

Europe

European monetary union (EMU) 344, 358, 380–381, 403–404

Euro 403, 472

Euro-sceptics 344, 404, 473–475, 476, 490–491, 493

Europa 61

European Community 344–345, 403

European Parliament 96

Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) 320, 344, 379–381, 472–474

Maastricht treaty 403–404, 473–474, 476

Single currency 344, 403, 473

Foreign affairs

Afghanistan 602–604

Berlin Wall 351–352

bin Laden, Osama 598

Bosnian War 570–572, 574–579, 585–589

Chechnya 592–593

China 348–349, 354, 523–534, 644

Deng Xiaping obituary 527

Cold War 160, 215, 357, 387, 559, 567, 609 see also Soviet Union Gorbachev tribute 568

Crimean War 140

Croatia 574–575

Eastern Europe 346–347, 350–357

East and West (Chris Patten) 530–531

Falklands War 119–137, 140–141, 152, 205

Hitler Diaries 167–180, 641

Hong Kong 350, 503–504, 525–526, 528

Human Rights Act and libel laws (Loutchansky case) 517–521

Iraq 149, 387–388, 389–398

Kurds 387, 397

Islamic fundamentalism 597

Israel 149, 150–154, 334, 337, 561

Kuwait 386–389

Lebanon 149, 150–155, 334–337

Mirsky and Freedom Forum controversy 531–534

Palestine 149, 153, 335, 561, 562

Poland (Solidarity) 145

Prisoners of Conscience 144

Romania 353–355

Rwanda 581–584

Sierra Leone 583

Somalia 580

South Africa 159

Soviet Union 147, 159, 347–348

Tiananmen Square 348–349

Versace’s murder 466

Vincennes incident 337

Home news

BBC 186, 535, 540, 609

Brixton riots 72–75

Calcutt enquiry 513–514

Charles Stewart Parnell forgery 167–168

Cries Unheard, Mary Bell serialization 515–516

devolution 499–500, 553

Princess Diana’s death 504–507

environment 468

global warming 469

labour disputes, militant trade unions 75, 186–187

Loutchansky v Times Newspapers 517–521

National Lottery 446–447

Northern Ireland 70–72, 150, 336, 338, 339, 564–567

nuclear weapons 148

pop culture 455–457

Press Complaints Commission 513–514, 516

racism 74

radioactive waste 308

reality TV 460

Thatcher, Denis, planning application 113

Politics

Conservative Party

Archer, Lord (Jeffrey) and London mayoral election 540

economic policy 320–322

Hague, William, and modernisation 550–1

Heseltine, Michael, resignation 310

donations, the Ashcroft affair 536–545, 609

Howe, Geoffrey

Budget Day 108

resignation 382

leadership challenges 382–384, 483–4, 494–495

Major, John, 476–477, 481–482, 489–490

Parkinson, Cecil, and Keays, Sarah 165–166

Poll Tax 375, 376–382

Portillo, Michael, 551

privatization 162

public spending cuts 120–121

Thatcherism 158, 162, 344

trade union reform 114, 157

unemployment 161

general elections

(1979) 14

(1983) 162–165

(1987) 313–316

(1992) 406–408,

(1997) 489–493

(2001) 555–557

Labour Party

Blair, Tony, 483

Brown, Gordon 497

devolution 499–500, 553

Government leaks 552–553

tax plans 405

‘Third Way, or Reich’ 553

House of Commons, Parliamentary Privileges 309

Referendum Party 488–489

Scoops

Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate 552

Ulster framework 564–565

Sports

Increased coverage 625

Glen Hoddle interview 520–521

Football and economic renaissance 327, 442–444, 646

Terrorism

Fukuyama theory 356–357

War on terror 601–602

World Trade Center bombing 599–601, 642, 643

Editors (in order of appointment) see Evans, Harold; Douglas-Home, Charles; Wilson, Charles; Jenkins, Simon; Stothard, Peter; Thompson, Robert

Gray’s Inn Road

closure threat 35

demarcation rules 89, 294–295

Murdoch offers freehold to print unions 276–278, 281–282

new site talks 5, 223

poor morale 85, 102

print capacity 249

property assets 25

sold to ITN 297

TNL papers 19, 33, 52

Journalists/journalism

computer technology 258, 294–296, 435

defections/departures 54–57, 91–92, 94–95, 333, 343, 360, 485

‘dumbing down’ 38, 40–42, 189–91, 208, 531, 613–625

editorial structure 401, 645–646

Evans’s departure 110

‘feminization’ 623–624

good journalistic practices 520–521

information technology 640–643

library 285

life-style articles 622–623

move to Wapping 249, 253–256, 257–265

Murdoch’s editorial influence 21, 26, 38–39, 41–44, 59, 83, 85, 96, 114–116, 186–187, 189, 198, 337, 531–532, 534, 613–625, 644

salaries 15–16, 94, 220, 285–286

self-censorship 129–130, 530

trainee scheme 340–341, 417, 579

‘The Thunderer’ 103

Layout

changes 58–63, 92–93, 113, 117, 372

and the Falklands War 140

first colour page 61–63

headlines 338, 370, 372, 420, 613

masthead 63, 119, 420, 613–614

nude advertisement 42

visual appearance 613–14

Legal actions

Routledge and the miners’ strike 188

Loutchansky case 517–521

Longley case 419

Press awards

Lord Derby Racing Journalist of the Year 203

What the Papers Say 105, 582, 594

Printing

Atex computers 231, 233–234, 236, 247, 258

cold composition 86–87, 92, 110

colour 409, 420, 613, 622

computer-setting 193–194, 294–296

corrections and misprints 284–285

electronic page make-up 410

in linotype 10–13, 86–87, 220

production problems 193–195, 219–220

steam press 230

typeface change 410

Profitability 84–85, 95, 98–99, 116, 191, 422, 437

cover price 272, 411, 422–435, 437

Sections & editions

Archaeology 637

Architecture 373, 638

Arts 91, 198, 423, 446–452, 458–462

Astronomy 637

Book reviews 180–183, 189, 419, 462

Bridge 638–639

Business pages 161–162, 214, 323–325, 423, 620–622

Cartoons 56, 59, 97, 199–200

Chess 421, 638

Cinema 184–185, 464

Columnists 438

Cookery 201, 359

Court & Social 56, 637–639

Crossword 59, 639

Diary column 198–200, 512

Education 75–76, 263–264, 263, 318–319, 479–80

Europe edition 14

Family money 322

Fashion 201, 303, 361, 466–468

Features 55, 201, 373, 438, 548, 607

Female interest 201, 623–624

Foreign editions 410

Gardening 207–208, 359

Health 467–468

Information Service 59

Innovation Special 248

Interface 469

Jenkins’s changes 373–374

Law 373, 637

Letters 626–630

Life and Times 374

Lives Remembered 607

Magazine 438, 623

Millennium edition 546

Modern manners 438–439

Moreover 56

Music 447–457

Nature notes 638

Obituaries 315, 339, 606–607, 630–636

Parliamentary proceedings 308–312, 402

Play 622

Preview 60, 90–91

Property 320–321, 359, 481

Royal reporting 61–63, 112, 142, 209–210, 504, 513, 627, 634

The Register 607, 626, 636–638

Religious affairs 258, 285, 375, 41–419

Restaurants 359–360

Rock music 453–457

on Saturday 359

Saturday Review 91, 373–374

School league tables 479

Science 468–469

Scottish edition 500–503

Special Reports 61

Sports coverage 201–206, 325–331, 359, 423, 433, 439–445, 607, 625

T2 tabloid 467, 548–549, 606, 623

Television 185–186

Theatre 183–184, 462–464

‘The Way We Live Now’ 144

Times Online 470–471, 624, 642

Travel 321, 359

Two and four section paper 297, 322–323, 359, 420, 606

Universities 34, 75–76, 93, 319, 479–480, 637

Weekend Review 623

Weekend Times 374, 438, 622

Wine 359

Sponsorship

Artangel 461

Mysteries of China exhibition 526–527

World Chess Championship 421

Wapping

boycott campaign against The Times 262–264

as catalyst for change 238–241

conspirators 231–238, 246–248

eleven-acre site 222–230

first edition 256–257

‘Fortress Wapping’ 195, 219–252

increase in profitability 95, 297–298, 400

‘Innovation Special’ 248

move rejected by Murdoch 85

moving day 250–252

praise for Murdoch 259–260, 273

price of victory 292–299

public opinion 270–276

road distribution 233, 244, 250, 265–266, 278

siege/pickets/intimidation 255, 256–260, 267–270, 274, 278–280, 282–287, 289–292, 301–302

union negotiations 231–238, 242–246, 248–256, 276–288

Times Educational Supplement, sale of 2, 34, 263

The Times Good Universities Guide 319, 479–480

Times Higher Education Supplement 34

Times House of Commons 315

Times Literary Supplement 2, 34, 178, 180, 608

Times New Roman 60

Times Newspapers Limited (TNL) 19–24

and the BBC 186

computerization 13

finances 84–85, 95, 98–99, 116, 191, 422, 437

Hitler Diaries 169–170

House of Commons, TNL Sale, 26, 29–31, 188, 308–309

Holdings board 32, 49–50, 247

independent directors 31

industrial relations 5, 10–14, 15–16, 86, 90, 157, 221 see also print unions; Wapping

Loutchansky v TNL 518–521

Monopolies Commission 27–32

redundancies 98, 116

sale 1–7, 17–23, 25, 28–32

tax losses 2

transfer of titles 98–99

Titanic (dir. James Cameron) 464

TNT 233, 244, 250, 265, 278, 284, 287, 289, 293

Tobin, James 69

Today 238, 240, 273, 298, 301, 307, 381, 428

Todd, Ron 250, 267

Tokes, Laszlo 354

Tom and Viv (Michael Hastings) 183

Topolski, Daniel 328

Townsend, Edward 616

Toynbee, Polly 78

Trade Union Act (1984) 227, 239, 248, 287

Trafalgar House 40

Trainspotting (dir. Danny Boyle) 465

Trelford, Donald 163, 274

Trevisan, Dessa 145, 353

Trevor-Roper, Hugh see Lord Dacre

Trievnor, Peter 62

Trilogy of the Dragon (Robert Le Page) 183

Trimble, David 565–566

Truss, Lynne 444

TUC (Trades Union Congress) 90, 156, 158, 227–228, 231, 244, 261–262, 278, 287, 293, 380

Tudjman, Franjo 568, 578

Turner, Graham 179

Turnill, Oscar 60

Twentieth Century Fox 401

U

UK Press Gazette 214, 259, 302

Ukraine 567

United Nations 387, 389, 396, 397, 486

failure of mission 575–576

international jurisprudence 595

Protection Force (UNPROFOR) 570, 572

resolutions 597

Security Council 560

Somalia 580

Unemployment 404, 472–473, 554

United Newspapers 5, 272

University Grants Committee 75

Upton, Judy 463

Urquhart, Cath 624

United States

aid to Israel 152

and al-Qaeda 602

and Baltic States 570

and Bosnian war 574, 579

Drug Enforcement Agency 538, 542

and Gulf War 388, 389, 392, 396, 560

intervention in Grenada 159

and Middle East 152–153, 561

and Somalia 579–581

and Taleban 602–605 see also Bush, George; Bush, George W.; Clinton, Bill; Reagan, Ronald

USA Today 232, 240

Utley, T.E. (Peter) 315, 339

V

Van Den Belt, Annelies 470

van der Vat, Dan 44

Versace, Gianni 466

Vickers, Hugo 633

Vincent, Professor John 274

W

Wade, Joe 2–3, 33

Wagner, Erica 462, 534, 624

Waite, Terry 335

Wakeham, Lord (John) 516

Walden, Brian 342

Walesa, Lech 145–146, 357

Walker, Christopher 152, 154, 314, 347, 390–391, 395

Walker, David 357, 374

Walker, Tom 588, 590

Wall Street Journal 158, 410

Walter family (Times owners) 4

Walter, John 23, 63, 207, 210

Walter, John II 230

Walters, Sir Alan 344–345, 379

Wapping

Archive and Record Centre 510

Atex computers 231, 233–234, 236, 247, 258

boycott campaign 262–264

as catalyst for change 238–241

colour presses 400

conspirators 231–238, 246–248

eleven-acre site 222–230

first edition 256–257

Goss press machines 259

increase in profitability 95, 297–298

move rejected by Murdoch 85

moving day 250–252

praise for Murdoch 259–260, 273

price of victory 292–299

production runs 253–255, 259–260, 271–272, 296–297

public opinion 270–276

re-equipping 400

road distribution 233, 244, 250, 265–266, 278

siege/pickets/intimidation 255, 256–260, 267–270, 274, 278–280, 282–287, 289–292, 301–302

subsequent fallout 301–304, 307

The Times’s new residence 509–510

union negotiations 231–238, 242–246, 248–256, 276–288

Wapping Post 271

Wapshott, Nicholas 55, 80, 599, 622

Wardle, Irvine 183–184, 462

Warman, Christopher 261, 321, 324

Warner, Deborah 451

Washington Post 5–6, 230, 232

Watkins, Alan 91

Watkins, Lord Justice 264

Watson, Arthur 52

Watson, Colin 64, 198

Watson, Peter 94

Watson, Roland 599

Watt, David 55

Watts, David 127, 370, 522–523, 618, 619

Waugh, Auberon 53–54, 260

We Thundered Out (Philip Howard) 207

Webb, Colin 169, 171, 174–175, 195–196, 198, 212–214, 217, 250, 304, 418

Webster, Philip 311, 315, 345, 404, 419, 552, 601

Weekly Times Group 36

Wei Jingsheng 528, 532

Weidenfeld, Lord (George) 431

Weinstock, Lord (Arnold) 4

Weir, Judith 450

Welch, Colin 106, 108

Welland, Colin 184

Weller, Paul 453

Welsh, Irvine 465

Die Welt 61, 357

Westlake, Melvyn 69

Westland Helicopters 310

What the Papers Say 106

Wheatcroft, Patience 608, 620, 624

White Swan letter 105

Whitehead, Phillip 26

Whitelaw, Lord (William) 73, 74, 125

Whiteread, Rachel 459, 461

Whittam Smith, Andreas 240, 300–301, 411, 415, 428, 430

Whittell, Giles 600

Whitty, Larry 262

Whitworth, Damian 537

Widdecombe, Ann 495, 551

Wiener, Martin 49

Wigg, Lord (George) 127

Wilby, Peter 98

Williams, Delwyn 30

Williams, Hywell 489

Williams, Marcus 203, 439–440

Williams, Richard 60, 90, 201, 235, 246, 325, 360, 363, 365, 447, 452, 457, 625

Williams, Shirley 76, 79, 164, 315, 317

Willis, Bob 204, 207

Willis, Norman 248, 278, 281, 290

Willson, Richard 345, 490

Wilson, Charles

acting editor of the Independent 365

background 196–198

deputy editor 212–14

Hitler Diaries 169, 173, 178

East European emissary 364–365

and Thatcher 310, 318

personality 332–334, 337–338, 361–363, 414

Seeley’s retirement party 203

Sun-Times editor 217–218

as Times editor

assessment of editorship 365–6

appointed editor 218

‘Big Bang’ 324–5

‘dumbing down’ 208

expanding the paper’s size 322–323, 358

increase in sales 263

journalists’ pay offer 286

Independent launch 300–303, 608

and ‘nemesis’ (Andrew Knight) 362–363, 365

new offices 257–265

promoting Sky TV 361–362

skilful editor 365–366

and Thatcher 318

Wapping 229–230, 231, 234–235, 238, 242, 246–247, 250–251, 256, 272, 292

Wilson, Des 105

Wilson, Harold 27

Wilson, Roy ‘Ginger’ 248

Wilson, Tony 454

Winchester, Simon 122–123

Winter, Bishop Colin 124

The Winter War (John Witherow and Patrick Bishop) 138

Wintour, Patrick 263

Witherow, John 72, 123–124, 129–132, 134–138, 140

Wober, J.W. 629–630

Wood, Alan 164

Wood, Nicholas 344, 346, 418

Wood, Ronnie 453

Woodcock, John 203–204, 440

Woodhead, Chris 478–479

Woodward, Admiral Sandy 131

Worcester, Bob 316

World Trade Center bombing 599, 642, 643

World Trade Organization 594–595

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine 272, 313, 618–619

Wright, Jonathan 335

Wyatt, Woodrow 28–29, 182, 232, 315, 350, 476, 492, 513

Y

yBas (young British artists) 458–461

Years of Upheaval 1973–77 (Henry Kissinger) 64

Yeltsin, Boris 567, 571, 574–575, 592–593

Yorkshire Post 262

Young, Hugo 54, 158, 178, 208, 298

Young, Lord (David) 315

Young, Robin 198

Young, Toby 341

Yugoslavia 568, 591 see also Bosnia; Croatia; Dayton Accord; Eastern Europe; Serbia; Slovenia

Yuppies 313

Z

Zaire (Congo) 582–583

Zhao Ziyang 523

Zhu Rongji 527–528

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers

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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005

Copyright © Graham Stewart 2005

1

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