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 ha
ir’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 T
he 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.
The History of the Times Page 12
