The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  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 subsid
iary 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.