The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  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.