The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  There were activists outside the gates of Wapping, and employees within, who believed the company was ripe to re-unionise. At a Westminster cocktail party, a union official smiled narrowly at me. ‘We’re coming back, you know,’ he said. Our journalists were picking up the same message among trade union officials and Labour MPs.

  Trade unions provided Labour’s lifeblood of cash, as well as millions of votes. They wanted to be free of the restraints Thatcher had imposed, and Labour had promised, if it won the election, to reinstate powers that could allow the unions to force their way back into Wapping.

  But unions were no longer at the heart of News International’s problems. The threat from them was symptom not cause. We were desperate to keep out the unions, but our problems were home-grown.

  —

  Bill O’Neill had been Australian, in every way — a laconic, soft-spoken, country style of Australian, even though he grew up on Sydney’s North Shore. By the time we worked together in Wapping, O’Neill had been body-snatched by the spirit of Texas. He wore sharp-tipped snakeskin boots with Cuban heels, heavy turquoise and silver rings, string leather ties, and Western-style jackets decorated with curved and pointed piping. It was cowboy business attire. O’Neill remained laconic as he morphed into a Texan, but became more Gary Cooper than Paul Hogan. He even had a rolling, just-off-a-horse gait, but only since he broke a hip running for a train in icy Poughkeepsie, 2000 miles from his home in San Antonio.

  Wapping was in trouble, and when Rupert made me boss, he sent Bill O’Neill ahead with his knuckle-duster rings to clean up the place. O’Neill was the sheriff of Wapping, gliding through its corridors, nodding to passers-by, leaning here and there on the wall to talk, fingers slipped into the horizontal pockets of his trousers. No one knew Wapping better than him, and no one was a better peacemaker. He was the chief negotiator who settled the Wapping dispute in 1987 and then became friends with his trade union counterpart, Brenda Dean. They dined together regularly to share war stories, like respectful old generals who had made peace. O’Neill was one of my heroes.

  Wapping was a peaceful place in the years following the dispute. New technology had made the newspapers far more efficient, employees felt secure and fairly treated, and bosses were delivering good profits to News Corp’s New York headquarters. But a few years before I arrived, there was an economic downturn. Consumers stopped spending and companies stopped marketing; big declines in advertising revenue mean trouble for newspapers. When managers get lax in good times — and this happens a lot — they are forced to take painful action when business dries up. This is what happened at News International, and by 1995 there were so many layoffs that Friday became known as Black Bag Day — you needed the bag to empty the contents of your desk.

  O’Neill was dismayed by what he found. The company was boiling with anger and resentment. In personal papers donated to Warwick University, he writes: ‘Morale was in the basement and distrust of senior management extreme.’ O’Neill was convinced the company would lose a union ballot in a landslide.

  When Richard Stott became editor of Today, one of News Corp’s three dailies, he was shocked at what he found. Stott had been editor of the Daily Mirror, and in his memoir Dogs And Lampposts, he writes of his arrival in 1993: ‘For years we envied News International their management [but] I was amazed to find excesses … inefficiency, overstaffing, and indiscipline long since eradicated at the Mirror.’ Evening print runs, he said, were ‘rarely managed without some form of disaster’. It was so bad that Stott suspected print workers were sabotaging the presses.

  O’Neill’s advice to me was clear. ‘You must act quickly. You’ve got to be seen and heard,’ he said. ‘They’ve got to believe things have changed.’

  We decided on a company road show to all our big offices, travelling from London to Merseyside, Manchester, Glasgow, Peterborough, and Dublin. Every employee was invited to hear from the new team. A fancy, portable set was built to serve as a backdrop for each appearance. A giant screen came with us to display optimistic video and slides, with numbers laying out the company’s strengths and difficulties.

  The first session was mid-afternoon in the vast newsprint warehouse in London. Hundreds of seats were placed among newsprint reels stacked to the ceiling. The detail of our presentation doesn’t matter much now; the important point was to make people feel involved. We told them as much as we sensibly could about our financial performance, growing costs, opportunities, and threats, remembering whatever we said would surely leak. This kind of open session seemed years later to be a natural thing to do, but in the 1990s many companies didn’t care so much about keeping the mass of their workforce informed.

  But it was only one small step. The plant was a factory building with rudimentary office space that had been added as an afterthought. The building had ‘levels’ instead of floors, like a warehouse — I was on Level Six. When Wapping was at war and everyone was in the trenches, no one gave much thought to comfort in the office. But that was years ago and now there were unending complaints. It was not a thoughtful management that spent millions on a gaudy lobby and the splendid office suite I inherited, while crowding people into tiny, windowless offices.

  Doug Flynn was an animated Australian chemical engineer who had stumbled into newspapers. Flynn had joined News International a year before me and was about to quit when I arrived, fed up with his bosses. He had a tempestuous Irish streak, but a quick and logical mind, and I promoted him to be my number two. We worked together through the toughest years at Wapping, before he left the industry and went off to make millions in outside businesses, too restless to spend any longer as a second in command.

  ‘This place is a fucking dump,’ he told me soon after I arrived. It was only a slight exaggeration. We decided a gesture was needed, and Flynn developed a plan. We bought a new building next door and moved The Times and The Sunday Times out of their rundown rum house. We began to renovate office space everywhere else. It took a couple of years, but spirits were lifted just by the knowledge it was happening.

  The road show became an exhausting annual event. We also introduced a regular workforce opinion poll, the results of which were not always comfortable reading. Thousands came to ‘family days’ at the plants in London, Merseyside, and Glasgow, with food stalls and games, and exhibits where parents showed children what happened where they worked.

  We had an annual retreat with members of the Staff Association Consultative Council, who had been elected by employees. These could be boisterous meetings. At our 1999 session, some of the council were determined to shut down the plants on New Year’s Eve so everyone could celebrate the millennium. It was a terrible idea, and out of the question. We were newspaper people, I told them. The arrival of the new millennium was historic. How could we not have newspapers with the date 1 January 2000? It was our duty to record the moment. Thousands would keep our newspapers as souvenirs.

  There was silence when I finished, but they knew I was right. One of the Liverpool members stood at the back. ‘That means you’ll be working that night too, right?’ There was no escape.

  ‘You got me,’ I said. ‘I will be now.’

  And so, on the night of 31 December 1999, I wandered the Wapping plant with nothing to do but show my face while the rest of the family reunited more than 3000 miles away in New York.

  Showing my face was always a good idea. It’s amazing what you discover by leaving a lonely desk. There are always unpleasant secrets that executives keep to themselves. Hyman Rickover, the admiral who developed nuclear propulsion for the US Navy and who had a formidable reputation for hard work and high standards, said: ‘Always use the chain of command to issue orders, but if you use the chain of command for information, you’re dead.’ It was advice I commended to everyone.

  The discontent faded over the years, but it would be overdoing it to say Wapping became an industrial paradise. Jobs were lost when projects failed, o
r economies demanded it. Digital began to squeeze our profits, managers made dumb mistakes, and badly treated employees won grievances. We were like every other media company struggling into the new millennium. But there was never a serious effort to bring back the unions.

  In his book, Richard Stott gives me the credit for this. He says my ‘more relaxed, informal, and accessible style kept the unions out of Wapping. But for Murdoch it had been a damned close run thing, too close for comfort.’

  It was hard work and I don’t remember often feeling relaxed. But Bill O’Neill, the shrewd, soothing sheriff of Wapping, deserved much of the praise. There is an old saying that you can get anything done so long as you don’t care who gets the credit. It was a corny epigram until I worked in Wapping with O’Neill. I didn’t meet many like him in Hollywood. All he wanted was to do the job and head out of town, back to Texas.

  —

  When it came to swinging elections, politicians in Britain gave newspapers too much credit. Naturally, no newspaper tried hard to disabuse them, but it was mostly nonsense that the press determined election results. Two years after Neil Kinnock lost the 1992 general election, and after the death of his successor, John Smith, Tony Blair was reshaping the Labour Party. In 1997, he swamped the Conservatives, winning his party more seats than ever before. No newspaper campaign would have changed the 1997 result. After 18 years in government, the Conservative Party’s own blunders and internal fighting had reduced it to a nervous wreck.

  But Blair and his inner circle were taking no chances. Nor were the Conservatives, for that matter. They still placed value on The Sun’s support and worked hard to maintain it as the 1997 election approached. My first invitation to Number 10 Downing Street was for a party hosted by John Major, but it was the American guest of honour I most remember.

  An invitation to Number 10 makes an impression. Walking through the tall black gates guarding Downing Street, towards that blackened Georgian symmetry, is like entering a sculpture you have known all your life. Most of the time, you don’t even need to knock on the towering entrance, with its patent leather sheen; as you approach, it magically opens. I walked for the first time through that front door in November 1995, up a staircase lined with portraits of past prime ministers.

  Guests were crowding around in happy-eyed anticipation. Downing Street staff offered drinks with looks of blank routine. A hand squeezed my elbow. ‘Come on over and meet the president,’ said John Major, and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom led me across the great drawing room to meet the President of the United States.

  Bill Clinton was standing with his back against a fireplace. Hillary Clinton looked sullen on a gold sofa, surrounded by other women. Major pressed me into the tight group around Clinton, so that I was standing to his left. ‘Hi,’ Clinton said with his famous blue-glow beam. We talked about Northern Ireland, Europe, and his Rhodes Scholar days in Britain in the 1960s.

  All the time, Clinton was leaning on me, not just touching shoulder to shoulder, but leaning. If I had suddenly moved, he would have lost his balance. It’s an unusual feeling being leaned on like that by the world’s most powerful man. I discovered seven years later that it was not a unique experience. The American journalist Joe Klein, in his book The Natural: the misunderstood presidency of Bill Clinton, writes about bowling with Clinton in New Hampshire. ‘At times, as we stood there, waiting for our balls to return down the alley, he’d lean up against me — a strange feline sensation; he needed the physical contact.’

  Before the 1997 election, when Blair came to lunch with The Sun’s editors, he knew he was not among friends. Rupert may have been softening towards him, but key people at The Sun were not convinced.

  Stuart Higgins, The Sun’s hyperactive editor, hated the idea of supporting Labour. He would wake me at home in the early hours with emotional pleas to reject Blair. Trevor Kavanagh, the urbane political editor, thought it was a terrible idea. So did Chris Roycroft-Davis, the chief leader writer. Roycroft-Davis never adjusted to the change; when Rupert walked into his office a few days after The Sun endorsed Labour, Roycroft-Davis sprung to attention. ‘Good morning, comrade,’ he said, with a salute.

  At lunch, these men put Blair through an intense grilling. As Blair answered their questions, he cast glances towards his aide Alastair Campbell, checking on his reaction. To express approval of his boss’s performance, Campbell responded with almost imperceptible nods. A former political editor at Today, Campbell had left News International when Blair became leader. He was a blunt adviser and a fierce advocate to the media. He admired his boss, but never flinched from confronting him. I never heard another adviser interrupt the prime minister with the words: ‘Tony, that’s total bollocks.’

  In his final weeks as opposition leader, Blair, Rupert, and I had dinner with our wives. Blair wanted a discreet venue, so they came to our house in Hampstead. It was a last-minute plan, and Mary went out for off-the-shelf Marks & Spencer meals and supermarket wine. ‘I hope we haven’t put you to any trouble,’ Cherie Blair said.

  ‘Not at all,’ I replied, ‘all we had to do was microwave it.’

  Blair responded amenably that evening to whatever Rupert said, and slickly changed the subject whenever the European single currency and other tricky matters arose. The single currency was always an issue. David Blunkett came to the house for dinner when he was home secretary and kept waving at Rupert with a €5 note he had pulled from the breast pocket of his jacket.

  As the Blairs walked away down our garden path that night, Rupert said: ‘I like him. She’s a bit odd, but I like him.’

  Soon after I arrived in London in 1995, Campbell had come to visit me with another close aide to Blair, Peter Mandelson. They were two of the principal architects of the New Labour revival that would return their party to power. They were an unusual couple. Mandelson smiled in a way that made it feel risky to smile back. He looked away when he spoke. Campbell had an air of incipient anger and when he smiled, his stony eyes did not always join his mouth. I did not detect much warmth between them.

  They came in friendship, however, because Mandelson made a surprising proposal. He offered to help us remake Rupert’s image, which, he said helpfully, could do with ‘improvement’ in Britain.

  Labour’s great rebranding had been to substitute its militant red flag with a moderate red English rose. Mandelson took part in this rebranding, but the rose was Neil Kinnock’s idea.

  ‘I hope you’re not going to propose a rosebud,’ I said. I had never heard a more ridiculous and self-serving proposition.

  At Mandelson’s request, I arranged a discreet lunch with Rupert in one of the private townhouses connected to The Athenaeum Hotel in Piccadilly. Towards the end of the meal, Mandelson subtly suggested Rupert might make a donation to the Labour Party. After he had gone, Rupert was thoughtful. ‘Maybe I could give Blair a private donation,’ he said.

  ‘Do you honestly believe Labour would keep quiet about you giving them money?’ I asked. ‘There’ll be a photo of the cheque in The Guardian within 24 hours.’ We quickly decided it was a bad idea.

  The pre-election charm of Labour lost its intensity in the years after Blair took occupancy of Number 10. Blair saw us frequently. He was usually cordial, but sometimes the meetings were tough. On one occasion, I was at Downing Street with Rupert, and, after talking for a while with the visiting Australian prime minister, John Howard, we left the grand formal rooms and took a small lift to the Blairs’ rooms on the top floor.

  The flat was modest and chaotic in a family home kind of way. The lobby was cluttered with toys — their youngest son Leo was still a toddler. In the compact living room were two sofas on either side of the fireplace, and Blair’s guitar rested in a corner. Rupert and I sat tightly together on one sofa opposite Blair.

  I got an uneasy sense this was not going to be a regular chat when Blair’s three most senior aides walked into the room and took up positio
n beneath a window to our left. Jonathan Powell was Blair’s chief of staff, a patrician looking man whose oldest brother, Charles, had been an adviser to Thatcher. Weirdly, the brothers pronounced ‘Powell’ differently. Sally Morgan was a baroness with cropped reddish hair, and another of Tony’s inner circle. Alastair Campbell looked mischievous.

  We were four feet apart across a coffee table when Tony launched into an attack on The Sun, rattling off a list of stories he thought unfair or inaccurate. I had never seen him so fierce. What was interesting was that he directed none of his attack at Rupert. It was the perfect moment to give him a piece of his mind, but he left Rupert untouched, aiming all his ire at me. I became Rupert’s proxy while he sat right next to me without saying a word. In the car heading out of Downing Street, Rupert put a reassuring hand on my knee.

  ‘You handled yourself very well in there,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks for your support,’ I replied.

  Sometimes the meetings were more amusing. I was in Downing Street for dinner with Rupert and his sons Lachlan and James. Blair and his wife were the only people with us, apart from the inevitable Campbell. The discussion became heated as the evening advanced and James, agitated by his father’s opinions on Israel, began swearing loudly and freely. After he had used the words ‘fuck’ and ‘fucking’ a dozen or so times, I became uneasy. I know the feeling of being attacked by adult children who think they know everything, but we weren’t at home sitting around with a few beers.