I was naturally startled and asked David if he really thought Murdoch was the answer to The Observer’s prayers. David shook his head uneasily, saying: ‘Well, he owns The Australian, which is a respectable, upmarket paper. We can only hope that he handles The Observer in the same way. Better an efficient Visigoth than nobody at all.’
Then he told me that Murdoch proposed bringing over the editor-in-chief of The Australian, Bruce Rothwell, to play the same role at The Observer, with Anthony Shrimsley, political editor of The Sun, as editor. I was to be editorial director, sandwiched somewhere between the two. I had little doubt that the sandwich would be devoured as soon as Astor and Goodman left the premises.
Rothwell himself was undoubtedly a serious journalist, having been a war correspondent for an Australian paper, then worked in Berlin for the News Chronicle and in New York for the Daily Mail. He rose to be the Mail’s deputy editor until he and the editor, Arthur Brittenden, were ousted by David English in a palace revolution in 1971.
Rothwell was then hired by Murdoch to edit the Sunday edition of The Australian, where he wreaked havoc, causing staff unrest by unseating the popular editor of the daily, Adrian Deamer, and giving the paper an unwelcome and hotly contested lurch to the right. For all that he had a respectable CV, two things troubled me about Rothwell before I had even met him. One was that he was such a divisive figure wherever he went, and also very right-wing. This made him an odd choice for The Observer if it was to maintain its liberal character.
I knew nothing about Shrimsley except that he was the younger brother of Bernard Shrimsley, then editing Murdoch’s News of the World, and part of a talented family of journalists. Anthony’s son Robert became managing director of the Financial Times website. Anthony himself went on to be political editor at the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail and was editor of Sir James Goldsmith’s short-lived news magazine, Now. He also wrote some books about politics.
He was clearly a considerable journalist and, for all I know, might have made a good editor of The Observer. But the paper already had an editor and, having gone through the unwieldy Papal-like process of consultation about selecting me only a year before, the Observer journalists seemed unlikely to welcome a writer from The Sun being thrust upon them.
I flew to New York without telling anyone and had two meetings with Murdoch in his office. He was easy to get on with, oozing what Harold Evans described as his ‘dangerous charm’. We talked about The Observer and I showed him some campaigns we had run. His interest quickened when we got down to looking at headlines and newspaper design and exchanging the latest Fleet Street gossip.
At dinner with an American journalist friend between my meetings with Murdoch, I heard a rumour that he might be on the verge of buying the New York Post, a much bigger deal for him than The Observer. When I asked him about this the next day, he looked surprised that I knew about it and muttered evasively, clearly resenting my intrusion: ‘Dorothy Schiff has asked me to take a look at it, that’s all.’
I see from the notes I wrote down on the plane home that I had allowed a faint hope to rise in my mind that if Murdoch bought the Post he wouldn’t want The Observer. But I was clutching at straws. The prospect was gloomy. If he was bringing in Rothwell as my boss, that would mean shifting the paper to the right and abandoning all that Astor had represented over the previous three decades. I wondered whether David really understood this, or was in a haze of denial about it, worn down by the paper’s financial woes and carried along by Goodman’s conviction that this was the only possible salvation.
I urged Murdoch not to come into The Observer swinging an axe but to leave the senior staff in place until he could judge their performance. I said it was important that I should meet Rothwell to hear about his plans for the paper. Only in this way, I argued, could I make a fully informed recommendation to Astor and Goodman, and ultimately to the journalists, that the new arrangements would be in the paper’s best interests.
Murdoch, I’m sure, thought this was so much tosh, but he was amiable enough about it and arranged to see me again in London the following week. We met in the News of the World’s oak-panelled offices in Bouverie Street, which looked like a relic of the 1930s. As we walked down one of the gloomy corridors, he said laughingly: ‘When I came here most of the offices contained Oxbridge characters, usually wearing their Vincent’s or Hawks Club ties.’ My first thought was that I was glad I hadn’t chosen to wear a Cambridge tie that day. Then it struck me that, whether he liked it or not, he and I were both ‘Oxbridge characters’ ourselves.
He agreed to set up the meeting with Rothwell, assuring me I would find his ideas exciting. Rothwell and I met for lunch at the Garrick Club, where he was a member and I was on the long waiting list, proposed by Harry Evans, my rival at the Sunday Times, and by Tom Rosenthal, the publisher.
As soon as I met Rothwell, I could tell that Murdoch had failed to pass on my suggestion that the present editorial hierarchy should remain in place until he could get to know them. Rothwell, a burly, bespectacled, unsmiling figure, was scathing about what he called The Observer’s ‘wishy-washy liberalism’ and clearly couldn’t wait to get his hands on the paper and bend it to his will.
He urged me to read the American right-wing magazine Commentary and especially the ideas of Irving Kristol, the founding father of the budding neo-conservative movement. He enjoyed quoting Kristol’s definition of a neo-con: ‘A liberal who has been mugged by reality.’
I argued that moving The Observer to the right would be a suicidal strategy. Not only would readers be disaffected, but it would make no commercial sense, since the Sunday Telegraph and the Sunday Times (for all Evans’s attempts to liberalise its attitudes) were already serving that end of the market. He didn’t appear to be listening, his bright eyes shining through his glasses with the fervour of a religious convert.
I left the lunch with the firm conviction that The Observer was about to be mugged, not just by Rothwell’s crude conservatism, but by the inevitable drift down-market that was part of Murdoch’s DNA, no matter how hard he pretended otherwise. He was proposing to bring in a journalist from The Sun to replace me, without the slightest apparent awareness of how this would look to The Observer’s staff and readers. Neither man had uttered a single good word about The Observer or anyone who worked on it.
I then had a call from Bert Hardy, the senior management figure at Murdoch’s British newspapers, asking to meet me at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, an historic pub down a dark alley just off Fleet Street, where Dr Johnson, Charles Dickens and P. G. Wodehouse used to be regulars. (It occurs to me that Tom Stoppard could have written an amusing script of the conversation if they had all been there at the same time, clutching their pints.)
Hardy was a shrewd and experienced newspaper manager. He plunged straight in, saying he had a feeling that I wasn’t happy with the projected sale to Murdoch.
‘Why do you say that?’ I asked.
‘Well, Rupert says he can’t make you out and Rothwell didn’t think you liked him and wasn’t sure you would get on. That’s why they asked me to talk to you. You look a bit jumpy about it to me. You’re worried about your precious baby, aren’t you?’ he added, not unkindly. ‘But your baby is in intensive care and is in urgent need of treatment. We can provide that and I hear that nobody else is interested in keeping it alive.’
Hardy was a big man, founder of a dining group called The Fat Boys’ Club, where he conferred with other media figures of similar stature – in all senses. Behind his office desk he kept a gun in a glass case, presumably a relic from the Second World War, which added to his general aura of menace. He had a cast in one eye that made it difficult to look him squarely in the face.
He told me that I was too close to the journalists and that the editor at The Observer had too much authority and independence in the organisation. He explained: ‘This goes back to Astor, who was both editor and proprietor. You are not the proprietor, yet you talk as though you have the same power
as Astor. In our organisation editors know their place, which means they are answerable to Rupert and the management.’
I left the meeting unsure about what to do next. I was certain that the Murdoch/Rothwell takeover would be the end of The Observer I loved and whose character I had committed myself to maintain. At the same time, I was fully aware of the financial peril that the paper would face if Murdoch backed out. I decided it was time to tell my senior lieutenants and seek their advice.
As we were leaving the office after putting the paper to bed on Saturday night, I invited John Cole and Adam Raphael, the political correspondent, to supper at my house in Wimbledon on the following Monday evening and told them to come alone. They looked at me sharply, hoping for enlightenment, but I told them that all would be revealed, and that meanwhile they should tell no one about our meeting. They looked suitably intrigued and rather nervous.
When I revealed the Murdoch plan they were both depressed and outraged at the same time. John was angry with Goodman for suggesting it and said he would talk to his contacts in the Labour Cabinet who, he was sure, would be appalled. Adam said he failed to understand how David could invite a gangster like Murdoch to destroy his life’s work. I urged them to keep quiet until we could see a way forward and we agreed to meet again after giving the matter further thought.
We were pre-empted, however, by the front-page headline in the Evening Standard on 21 October saying that Murdoch had bought The Observer. There was a picture of me, that and the article reported I had seen Murdoch in New York and that my job was now at risk. There was a general assumption that I had leaked the story, but in fact I was as surprised as anyone else. A Fleet Street source told me later that the tip had, in fact, come from New York.
I was immediately assailed by my horrified Observer journalists, who naturally wanted to know what was going on. I rang Goodman and suggested that he should talk to a meeting of the journalists. He was reluctant but, after consulting Astor – and probably Murdoch too – agreed that such a meeting was unavoidable.
It took place in The Observer’s conference room, with Goodman and myself seated in front of a roomful of bristling journalists. Goodman gave a short introduction, outlining the paper’s serious financial problems and the trustees’ consequent dilemma, explaining that the approach to Murdoch was a last resort, though he expressed his high opinion of the Australian’s abilities.
When I was asked directly when I had known about the Murdoch deal, I reported on my meetings in New York and London and said I hadn’t finally decided what attitude to take to the deal when the news broke in the papers. Asked if I was now recommending the deal to the staff, I hesitated a long time, during which Goodman turned to me with a puzzled frown, and said I would like to hear the views of my editorial colleagues before answering that question. Alan Watkins, the paper’s political columnist and a good friend, told me afterwards that ‘the look of abject misery on your face said it all’.
Clive James, the paper’s TV critic, said people like Murdoch were the main reason why he and people like him had left Australia in the first place. Selling The Observer to Murdoch was ‘like giving your virgin daughter to a gorilla’. There was much comment in a similar vein. No journalist expressed any support for Murdoch, though some printers, who had joined the room to eavesdrop at the back, told me after the meeting that they weren’t going to allow the ‘bloody journalists’ to decide their future. The production unions were apparently all in favour.
These exchanges, especially the more quotable ones, appeared verbatim in the next morning’s papers, after which Murdoch issued a statement in New York saying he was withdrawing from the deal – ‘in view of the deliberate orchestrated attempts to build this into a controversy’. Fingers were pointed at me by several papers as the likely conductor of the dissenting orchestra, even though I had not uttered a single word in public against the deal.
Goodman told me bluntly that he regarded my ‘unenthusiastic’ attitude at the journalists’ meeting as ‘unhelpful and somewhat disloyal’, but went on to say that he had spoken to Murdoch and that his statement of withdrawal was not necessarily his final word. He might still be interested in The Observer if the offer was renewed. Goodman then added: ‘All he did actually was grunt, which I took to be a peculiarly Antipodean form of affirmative.’
Goodman must have known that the hostility he had encountered among the journalists made it impossible for the Murdoch deal to be revived. I reflected afterwards that it was Rupert’s own candour that had been his undoing: he didn’t have to say in advance that he would be ejecting me as editor, introducing two of his own candidates to run the paper and moving it politically to the right. Had he refused to see me at all, which was his first instinct, I would have had no ammunition to lead what Goodman later called a révolution de palais.
A few years later, reflecting on his failure to buy The Observer at a lunch with Times executives, Murdoch said to Suzanne Lowry, a former Observer women’s editor who was sitting next to him:
I should have had The Observer. My mistake was to underestimate Donald Trelford. It was all agreed. Astor and Goodman had agreed. Then they said: ‘You must meet the editor.’ We shook hands and he was very polite and charming. Then he went off and organised the opposition. And that was that.
Author and journalist Henry Porter, after referring to my ‘deft political skills and quiet opportunism’, commented on Murdoch’s remark: ‘It is the highest compliment that Murdoch, a man who is rarely outwitted by editors, let alone editors of liberal-minded newspapers palpably on the brink of crisis, could pay. It is also an accurate account of events.’
The Observer was now big news, and speculation about the paper’s future filled many newspaper columns. Questions were asked in Parliament. The publicity mobilised a contingent of interested bidders. From having nowhere to go except to Murdoch, the paper was suddenly offered a variety of possible homes.
The front runner was Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Daily Mail, which had prospered under the editorship of David English and outstripped its historic rival, the Daily Express. English gave an impressive editorial presentation to the trustees, and Lord Rothermere, the chairman, gave a characteristically languid and credible account of his relationship with English, saying that he allowed his editor a free hand in journalistic matters and kept a light touch on the tiller.
The chief drawback to Associated’s ownership, a key factor for Astor, was that it was an overtly right-wing publishing group and had even been blatantly fascist under Rothermere’s grandfather, supporting Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts and admiring Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. I sensed no warmth in Astor or Goodman towards the Mail and that neither of them thought it was a natural bedfellow for The Observer.
• • •
Looking back now, I can see a pattern in all this that wasn’t clear to me at the time. English’s mind was moving towards a Sunday version of the Daily Mail, which actually emerged less than six years later in the form of the Mail on Sunday. I think English would have made The Observer into a mid-market partner of the Daily Mail, saving the group the bother and expense of launching a new paper from scratch.
They must also have been concerned about the future of their floundering Evening News, which was losing a fortune (and which they closed in 1980), and knew they might need a Sunday partner for their presses and to cover the group’s overheads. The Mail’s interest was such that they made another unsuccessful bid for The Observer five years later, in 1981, just a year before the Mail on Sunday’s launch.
I suspect that Murdoch had a similar idea for The Observer, though this only occurred to me afterwards. Both he and English were two of the most far-sighted players in the British newspaper market and they must have seen an attractive mid-market opportunity in the decline of the Sunday Express.
Murdoch virtually admitted this to me when we happened to meet on the day after the Mail on Sunday’s launch in May 1982, which had the good fortune to lead its first issue wit
h the fall of Port Stanley in the Falklands War. He was speaking to a body called the Milton Keynes Forum, of which I was a patron. Since I was one of the few people he knew at this gathering, he made a beeline towards me to talk about this dramatic new development in Fleet Street’s affairs.
He was clearly excited and asked me what I thought of the first issue. I said I didn’t think it was very good. The sport, in particular, was a joke, leading the back page with the story of the world roller-skating championships. He brushed these comments aside impatiently and said: ‘English will soon sort that out. Believe me, it’s going to be a big success.’
And, of course, he was right. After six weeks, English did sort it out, sending in his storm-troopers from the daily, launching a comic and a colour magazine and beefing up the news, features and design. The paper did become a big success, as Murdoch had forecast, soon overtaking the sales of its historic rival, the Sunday Express.
He had been extremely cordial with me, as though we had no past history to worry about, then looked at me rather meaningfully and said: ‘I could have produced the same sort of paper years ago if a certain person hadn’t stopped me.’ In reply, I pointed out that, had he succeeded in taking over The Observer, he would have been prevented from acquiring the Sunday Times and The Times, which he had bought from the Thomson group just a year before. He nodded in acquiescence, belatedly recognising perhaps that I had done him a favour after all.
• • •
Two footnotes to the Murdoch episode are worth recalling. When I eventually became a member of the Garrick, I went into the club and read the notice board containing the list of new members. A man standing next to me turned as he saw the club secretary approaching and said: ‘Will you point out Donald Trelford to me if he comes into the club?’ The secretary replied: ‘Mr Trelford is standing next to you.’
Shouting in the Street Page 18
